Communications of the ACM
Information Wants to Be Shared, E-Book Says
Credit: Harvard Business Review Press
A new ebook from Harvard Business Review Press takes a fresh examination of the economics of information selling in the digital age. What information really wants — what makes it more valuable, useful, and immediate, argues Joshua Gans, a professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, is to be shared.
Using the tools and logic of information economics, Information Wants to be Shared shows how sharing enhances most information's value. He also shows how the business models of traditional media companies, gatekeepers who have relied on scarcity and control, have collapsed in the face of new technologies. Equally important, he argues that sharing can revive moribund, threatened industries even as he examines platforms that have, almost accidentally, thrived in this new environment.
"Thinking about shared information, and innovative business models to achieve it, is really in its infancy. Platforms are developing that allow content to be distributed and then read easily. These are likely to produce important competitive forces for consumer attention," Gans says.
Gans is the Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Rotman School. Prior to 2011, he was the Foundation Professor of Management (Information Economics) at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, and prior to that he was at the School of Economics, University of New South Wales. In 2011, he was a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research (New England). Gans holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and an honors degree in economics from the University of Queensland.
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