Innovating Without Information Constraints: Organizations, Communities, and Innovation When Information Costs Approach Zero

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth J. Altman ◽  
Frank Nagle ◽  
Michael Tushman
Keyword(s):  
Information Costs ◽  
Information Constraints ◽  
Approach Zero

The economic analysis of rationality in the tradition of Harvey Leibenstein

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-38
Author(s):  
Ivan V. Rozmainsky ◽  
Yulia I. Pashentseva
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Informal Institutions ◽  
External Information ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
The Future ◽  
Information Constraints ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Market Capitalism

The paper is devoted to the economic analysis of rationality in the tradition of Harvey Leibenstein: the authors perceive rationality as “calculatedness” when making decisions, while the degree of this “calculatedness” is interpreted as a variable. Thus, this approach does not correspond to the generally accepted neoclassical interpretation of rationality, according to which rationality is both full and constant. The authors believe that such a neoclassical approach makes too stringent requirements for the abilities of people. In real life, people do not behave like calculating machines. The paper discusses various factors limiting the degree of rationality of individuals. One group of factors is associated with external information constraints such as the complexity and extensiveness of information, as well as the uncertainty of the future. Another group of factors is related to informal institutions. In particular, the paper states that the system of planned socialism contributes to less rationality than the system of market capitalism. Thus, in the post-socialist countries, including contemporary Russia, one should not expect a high degree of rationality of the behavior of economic entities. The paper mentions, in particular, the factors of rationality caused by informal institutions, such as the propensity to calculate, the propensity to be independent when making decisions and the propensity to set goals. The authors also believe that people who live on their own are usually more rational than people who share a common household with someone else. This assumption is verified econometrically based on data on young urban residents collected by the authors. It turned out that the behavior of people included in this database, in general, corresponds to what the authors believed.

Vertical Boilerplate

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Market Power ◽  
Real World ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Market Mechanism ◽  
Law School ◽  
Information Cost ◽  
Information Costs ◽  
Policy Proposals ◽  
Radical Solution

Despite what we learn in law school about the “meeting of the minds,” most contracts are merely boilerplate—take-it-or-leave-it propositions. Negotiation is nonexistent; we rely on our collective market power as consumers to regulate contracts’ content. But boilerplate imposes certain information costs because it often arrives late in the transaction and is hard to understand. If those costs get too high, then the market mechanism fails. So how high are boilerplate’s information costs? A few studies have attempted to measure them, but they all use a “horizontal” approach—i.e., they sample a single stratum of boilerplate and assume that it represents the whole transaction. Yet real-world transactions often involve multiple layers of contracts, each with its own information costs. What is needed, then, is a “vertical” analysis, a study that examines fewer contracts of any one kind but tracks all the contracts the consumer encounters, soup to nuts. This Article presents the first vertical study of boilerplate. It casts serious doubt on the market mechanism and shows that existing scholarship fails to appreciate the full scale of the information cost problem. It then offers two regulatory solutions. The first works within contract law’s unconscionability doctrine, tweaking what the parties need to prove and who bears the burden of proving it. The second, more radical solution involves forcing both sellers and consumers to confront and minimize boilerplate’s information costs—an approach I call “forced salience.” In the end, the boilerplate experience is as deep as it is wide. Our empirical work should reflect that fact, and our policy proposals should too.

Can We Approach Zero Relapse in Breast Cancer?

2005 ◽  
Vol 10 (S2) ◽  
pp. 9-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleftherios P. Mamounas
Keyword(s):  
Breast Cancer ◽  
Approach Zero

Neighborhood-Based Information Costs

2021 ◽  
Vol 111 (10) ◽  
pp. 3225-3255
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hébert ◽  
Michael Woodford
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Information ◽  
Topological Structure ◽  
Cost Functions ◽  
Binary Choice ◽  
Information Costs ◽  
Linear Quadratic ◽  
Rational Inattention ◽  
Linear Quadratic Gaussian ◽  
Perceptual Judgments ◽  
Perceptual Distance

We derive a new cost of information in rational inattention problems, the neighborhood-based cost functions, starting from the observation that many settings involve exogenous states with a topological structure. These cost functions are uniformly posterior separable and capture notions of perceptual distance. This second property ensures that neighborhood-based costs, unlike mutual information, make accurate predictions about behavior in perceptual experiments. We compare the implications of our neighborhood-based cost functions with those of the mutual information in a series of applications: perceptual judgments, the general environment of binary choice, regime-change games, and linear-quadratic-Gaussian settings. (JEL C70, D11, D82, D83, D91)

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