Information is the lifeblood of the knowledge economy. As it has shifted from a conduit of commercial transactions (signaling among other things quality and price) to the central good exchanged on information markets, its value has risen - and so has the need to govern the flow of information.
Much of this governance takes place among private actors - individuals keep and relay information to each other, and so do commercial enterprises. Rules - in the form of laws and regulations - aid in this governing of information, from intellectual property to privacy rights, from contractual non-disclosure clauses to mandatory transparency norms, like the ones found in the freedom of information acts. The governance of information is as much about excluding others from information flows, as it is to include - and the societal limits that constrain these decisions.
While the study of information flows has gain traction over the years, especially over the last decade (due to the rise of the Internet and the global information economy), the discourse over normative frameworks of information governance - going beyond particularistic views of IP or privacy or transparency - is still in its infancy.
This research initiative at the I+I Centre aims at contributing to the academic dialogue twofold:
(1) by offering robust empirical research on information flows subjected to various mechanisms of information governance
(2) by offering normative theories and framework to conceptualize the governance of information.
Copyright and information privacy rights are both rights governing information. As such they have a lot in common - as has been noticed by the academic community. What is intriguing , however, is how the rights themselves have risen only relatively recently, as an alternative to prior modes of governance and control - and how they are under pressure to yet change again.
In this research we look at the limitations of rights as the current mode of governance - and examine whether this mode is being replaced by an alternative one, and what are the shape and qualities of this alternative.
This research is part of a project run by Andreas Busch at the University of Göttingen and Jeanette Hoffman at the London School of Economics, both formerly at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB).
A publication (in German) is envisaged for 2010, and we'll be making available a draft working paper here.
This research projects looks at the market position of search engines. Many commentators have argued that Google not only dominates the search market, but through it has a captive audience it can targets its ads to. The audience is captive it is argued because consumers switching away from Google would incur prohibitively high costs.
This multi-pronged empirical research, conducted by post-doctoral research fellows Tracy Loh and Qiu-Hong Wang as well as centre director Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, aims at getting a sense of the perceived switching costs for consumers. It is currently taking place in Singapore, but we aim to have similar experiments run on other continents and with a variety of audiences. If you are interested in collaborating please do contact Tracy Loh.
With the rise of multi-player online games and virtual worlds - from World of Warcraft to Second Life - we have witnessed the development of vibrant virtual communities, in which participants spend a dozen and more hours a week online. But how do participants value - in economic terms - the time they spend online?
One way of answering this question is by looking at the value of virtual goods created and traded online. To this end post-doctoral fellow Qiu-Hong Wang advanced a research project that used a mix of theoretical modeling, experiments, and time series data analysis to offer robust answers for how valuable time spent in virtual worlds is - and which factors mostly determine that value.
The paper is currently under review and will be available here in draft form shortly.