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. more >>

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.

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