NOTE: These critiques are based on
suggestions from the class, but may have been modified from the
original wordings provided by individual students. Putting them
together demonstrates that there are a wide variety of interests in the
class.
| Name: | Competition |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
This section
discusses the success of Adam smith’s policies application to the
success of governments laid down in “Wealth of nations”. |
| Location: | The Utility of the
Market |
| Significance: | The discussion in this build up
paragraph helps one to understand how the Economics of Adam Smith times
worked. The introduction of Adam Smith policies becomes
significant because it happened at the time when the world economy
worked on the philosophy of mercantilism (holds that the prosperity of
a nation is dependent upon its supply of capital, and that the global
volume of international trade is "unchangeable." Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism) |
| Suggestion: | Smith explains
that self-interest acts as a guiding force toward the work society
desires. As Smith notes in Wealth, "It is not from the benevolence of
the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but
from their regard to their self-interest." While one would naturally
assume that everyone following only his or her self-interest would not
create a very good society, there is another force that prevents
selfish individuals from exploiting the marketplace. That regulator is
competition. This regulator on a whole is the underlying principles of
the economies that flourished following Adam’s policies. The Internet
makes it easy for competition to enter the electronic marketplace. Reference: http://www.zeromillion.com/econ/history-of-the-market-system.html : The History of Market System by Ryan P.M. Allis explains the market evolution capturing Adam Smith’s viewpoint. |
| Name: | Invisible hand |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
This section
discusses that Invisible hand as discussed by Adam Smith is the
foundation stone of our civilization’s social thought. |
| Location: | Utility of the
Market |
| Significance: | Understanding the concept of
Invisible hand will help impose the author’s claims to shake the
foundations of social thought, to be discussed later in the paper. |
| Suggestion: | Smith uses the
metaphor in the context of an argument against protectionism and
government regulation of markets. In general, the term “invisible hand”
can apply to any individual action that has unplanned, unintended
consequences, particularly those which arise from actions not
orchestrated by a central command and which have an observable,
patterned effect on the community. Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand provides different
interpretations, criticism, examples and arguments regarding the
invisible hand. |
| Name: | Role of the government |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
The section discusses the role of the government in the economy. The section suggests that the economic role of the government is to disappear. |
| Location: | 5th paragraph of ‘the utility of market’ section |
| Significance: | Where there is lack of governance there would be trouble if much care is not taken into consideration. |
| Suggestion: |
Government should be at least
partially involved in protecting the interests of society by regulating
any economic operation to ensure basic honesty and other stability
factors. The government of |
| Name: | Government
Interference |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
The decision for
the government to interfere with the online retail market and their
options |
| Location: | various places
throughout the whole paper |
| Significance: | The article discusses government
interference as an inevitable occurrence, and as simple as deciding to
do it. |
| Suggestion: | The article never
mentions the fact that the Internet is a global domain and there is no
solid global governing body. Many activities illegal in North
America are able to be carried out on the Internet without
reciprocation because the web sites are based over seas. While
sites such as the Pirate Bay ( http://thepiratebay.org/ ) have
recently been brought to court, they were able to operate without such
occurrences for much longer in countries such as Sweden than if they
had been based in the United States or Canada. |
| Name: | Excludability vs.
Rivalry |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
This section
focuses on the market system dependence on three implicit pillars
around which markets work |
| Location: | Technological
Prerequisites of the Market Economy |
| Significance: | The three implicit pillars of
market economy are considered as basis for comparison and contrast of
today’s economy of telecommunications and information-processing
industries with earlier world economics. There are some cases where
excludability and rivalry cannot be separated and understood, their
dependence become significant. |
| Suggestion: | The view that
excludability and rivalry are independent pillars of market economy is
not completely true. They are interdependent. For example, it’s easy to
exclude non-paying customers for apples. But it is impossible to
exclude free riders on public waterways or the atmosphere. If there is
rivalry in consumption, there is every reason to exclude. Both private
goods and commons goods are subject to consumption rivalry. But it is
much more difficult to clearly define and enforce the property rights
for commons goods. The issue to address is what good can be deemed
common. Reference:
http://livingeconomics.org/article.asp?docId=239 provides more
discussion about these two factors in dependence with each other. |
| Name: | Market Model |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
This section describes how technology is undermining the basic features of the “invisible hand” model of the economy. |
| Location: | “Technological” Prerequisites of the Market Economy |
| Significance: | The old model doesn’t fit as well with changes in the market from new technology. |
| Suggestion: | Would
there be an altered model that would work better in the digital age?
There is
value in seeing where one model fails, but also where a different model
succeeds. This article only shows one view of the marketplace and it
would be
helpful looking at other views in order to find some solutions. The existing model of Smith and the autors is based on financial greed. Toffler (in Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (1990)) identifies financial power with 2nd Wave societies (based on manufacturing of goods). LIkewsie he identifies power over information as the the basis for real power in 3rd Wave (post-industrial) societies. According to the Wikipedia entry on Alvin Toffler, "In this post-industrial society, there is a lot of diversity in lifestyles ("subcultures"). Adhocracies (fluid organizations) adapt quickly to changes. Information can substitute most of the material resources (see ersatz) and becomes the main material for workers (cognitarians instead of proletarians), who are loosely affiliated. Mass customization offers the possibility of cheap, personalized, production catering to small niches (see just-in-time production). The gap between producer and consumer is bridged by technology using a so called configuration system. "Prosumers" can fill their own needs (see open source, assembly kit, freelance work). This was the notion that new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the prosumer. In some cases prosuming entails a “third job” where the corporation “outsources” its labor not to other countries, but to the unpaid consumer, such as when we do our own banking through an ATM instead of a teller that the bank must employ, or trace our own postal packages on the internet instead of relying on a paid clerk." |
| Name: | Excludability still rules |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
The section discusses the dangers associated with restricting information and products away from the customers in order to create a sense of excludability on products and information. It does not however recognise some characteristics of information or product that would make the product maintain its excludability. |
| Location: | ‘Excludability’ section |
| Significance: | While the section suggests that current economy might endanger the rule of excludability, I think some products or information would maintain the sense of excludability. |
| Suggestion: | The demand for the product and
information, the type and availability of information affects the
excludability
of the product. Excludability has to be forced primarily on mass market information. For example, cable TV channels, the owner of cable TV are able to force some customers to pay for the channels (information) they would like to have. The cable owner manages to force the customer because of the demand for the product type. On the other hand, organizations that pay big bucks for specialized corporate intellegence on their competitors are not likely to share it. They will help exclude others. |
| Name: | Reciprocity |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
This section
address that reciprocity can overcome the absence of excludability to
help support the producer, reciprocity being considered as the basic
mode of every human being. |
| Location: | Excludability |
| Significance: | It’s impossible to ascertain
that reciprocity is a basic mode of every human being. |
| Suggestion: | Based on my
understanding and the definition of reciprocity, I think the trait of
Reciprocity cannot be ascertained to exist among all human being. As
Gorge Bernard Shaw’ golden rule goes "Do not do unto others as you
would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the
same." From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_of_reciprocity#Criticisms |
| Name: | power of lowest-common
denominator |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
The authors use broadcast television as their prime example to show how changes in excludability have changed the way profits are earned (advertisements rather than direct-billing customers). While this form of media has incresingly pandered to lowest-common denominator, technology has now created more specialized alternatives. |
| Location: | Section 4 - Excludability |
| Significance: | Information technology advances
make it feasible to meet increasingly specilaized needs. |
| Suggestion: | Developments on the Internet,
that lower the cost of broadcasting information, allow for ignoring the
masses and going back to specialized production. This is demonstrated by recent
special interest groups (e.g. specialized forums, blogs, groups of
Facebook friends, etc.). Lower cost information production also makes
it possible for the Internet to “intersect” with traditional broadcast
media (e.g.
news sites or YouTube). |
| Name: | Absence of
Excludability |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
The authors
discuss that in the future commodities that receive the most money will
not necessarily be targeted to what the consumer wants, but instead the
consumer will see stream-less amounts of advertisements to pay for the
commodity. |
| Location: | Last paragraph in
Excludability |
| Significance: | I think this is not
generalizable to all of economics. Sure there will be commodities
solely based on getting user demand through poor quality but there will
also be commodities targeted specifically to users through quality of
the product. |
| Suggestion: | The authors are
suggesting that the next economy is going to be largely based on bad
programming. By bad programming I mean terrible television shows still
being shown only because they can get enough people to mindlessly watch
and the networks can acquire enough money through the advertisement
channel that they are still making a profit. This method will still be
used in the next economy although there will be specialized commodities
based on the quality of the product. One example that I can think of is
World of Warcraft (WoW). Blizzard, maker of World of Warcraft, captures
a tremendous amount of money from monthly subscribers to play their
game. Also, other businesses prosper through the online community of
WoW by selling items, gold, etc. from the game in real life for real
money. |
| Name: | Revenue from
Broadcasting |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
The profit
structure of broadcast television is discussed |
| Location: | Excludability |
| Significance: | Profit for television programs
are discussed in terms of advertising money obtained due to the size of
viewership. This does not address more recent revenue streams adopted
by network television |
| Suggestion: | Sites such as Hulu
(www.hulu.com) now offer on demand viewing
of most shows available on NBC, Fox, and ABC. Hulu can allow more
small-audience shows to prosper, because they are no longer taking
viewing time away from more mass audience shows, as anyone can watch
any of the available shows at any time, allowing the two to co-exist. We should also consider the growing sales of TV on DVDs, which is an excludable approach to television. Though many television programs are pirated online, many shows have found success in DVD. Some, like Futurama, have garnered enough popularity on DVD after being cancelled that the network will bring back the show for another season (http://www.cbc.ca/arts/tv/story/2009/06/10/futurama-revival-new.html). This also supports the creation of niche shows with a hardcore fan base that will purchase the physical media, as opposed to a casual mass audience show with which few people care enough to seek it out. |
| Name: | Satisfaction and rivalry |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
The discussion attributes the cost of obtaining the goods/services rivalry to lack of (scare) availability of those goods/services . It assumes a rational demand for the goods/services based on actual need. It ignores the role of advertizing in creating perceived needs to increase demand. |
| Location: | ‘Rivalry’ section, 5th paragraph ‘prerequisites of the market economy’ |
| Significance: | I think these two are not the only factors that affect rivalry. |
| Suggestion: | There is a difference between
the need for goods/service and the demand for them. Customer satisfaction on what they had and owned should have played a big role in creating satisfaction. In the current economy, customers acquire products that they do not need while anticipating a future use. Other customers acquire products for self esteem. |
| Name: | Factors affecting transparency |
| Type: | |
| Discussion: |
The section attributes lack of product transparency on the complication of information and cost of acquiring it. |
| Location: | 2nd paragraph ‘Transparency’ section |
| Significance: | Identifying more factors that affect the product transparency would enable the current economic experts and policy makers to come up with solutions that would ease the economic problems that might emerge due to lack of transparency. |
| Suggestion | Change of
culture, way of thinking
and the way customers use products and information affect transparency. Availability of counterfeit product and information increasingly confuse the customer in determining what products and information acquire. This intern affects the economy. Customers’ lack of willingness to purchase information because of the dramatic change of value the information has from day to day is another factor. |
| Name: | Effects of different transparency levels on excludability |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
The section discusses how the new information based economy affects the information the customer gets. Because of the complicated and evolving ways involved in processing and providing information the customers find it difficult to understand. |
| Location: | 3rd-6th paragraphs ‘Transparency’ section |
| Significance: | While the section states how this complication will affect the economy, it doesn't say anything about the effect this will have on excludability. |
| Suggestion: | The complication of information and products would require customers to acquire more information or more help in the use of the product. This would empower excludability because the sellers would have products that the customers need. The empowerment of excludability might stabilise the economy. |
| Name: | Wilingness to pay for something does not correspond to its true value |
| Type: | Chalenge |
| Discussion: |
The authors make the claim that
"If purchasers need first to figure out
what they want and what they are buying, there is no good reason to
assume that their willingness to pay corresponds to its true value to
them." However they do not go further to explain the relationship
between these two concepts. This idea seems counter-intuitive to me, as I would expect that the more time someone spends deciding what they want and what they are actually buying that they would have a better understanding of what it is actually worth to them. It then seems logical to me that if you know what something is worth to you that your willingness to pay directly corresponds to the products value to you. If something is very valuable to you, you are more willing to pay for it. |
| Location: | First paragraph of the section on Transparency. |
| Significance: | Understanding value is at the center of this whole paper. While it is difficult to specify, we can relate the concepts of wilingness to pay and true value, if we consider the descrepancies between them. |
| Suggestion: | What the customers pay is still
equal to the true value. It is just that they have already paid out
something in their efforts to find out what they want to buy. So they
pay out more than what the seller gets, but what the seller gets is no
longer the value. |
| Name: | Amazon's "look-inside" service |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
There are various innovative ways of increasing transparency of products without giving them away totally. |
| Location: | Transparency |
| Significance: | This is one example of
ballancing the needs of excludability with those of transparency. |
| Suggestion: | Amazon provides a service to the book publishers that allow them to open parts of the book to the user. It can be difficult to know what you are getting in a book when you order online unless you have already seen the book or it is recommened by a trusted source. This service allows the consumer to look at select pages and section of the book in the hopes that the buyer will become more interested with the rest of the book. |
| Name: | Aids to
Transparency |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
Transparency is
not available in new complex digital products |
| Location: | Transparency |
| Significance: | New products have become more
complex but the access to critiques has also increased |
| Suggestion: | Since the
transparency of items has decreased dramatically, there has been an
explosion of consumer based critiques on products. Blogs, cites, and a
general flow of knowledge help pierce this now opaque layer. True, this
is more difficult with brand new products, as someone has to buy it
first, but sellers are also eager to get their product out. They will
then foreword their product to known critics, so that they can be
assessed and (hopefully) endorsed by them. This creates that original
flow of information. |
| Name: | Transparent
Functionality |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
The transparency
of functionality of new software releases |
| Location: | Transparency |
| Significance: | It is stated that finding the
current functionality of software is “notoriously difficult” to
determine without hands on experience for an extended period of
time. I believe that this is a false statement. |
| Suggestion: | Most companies
release public Release Notes with each build of their product that
highlight all of the new features they have implemented ( see http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.1.1.html
or http://www.tm4.org/documentation/MeV_4_4_release_notes.pdf
). There are also many forums publicly available in which anyone
can post questions about specific aspects of any software they choose
and have users with experience answer them ( such as http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com/forum/
) as well as a plethora of walkthrough and tutorials freely accessable
online ( http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/FX100485361033.aspx?pid=CL100605171033
). |
| Name: | Transparency VS
Privacy |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
We have taken lots
of kinds of information as products like digital data, music, and
knowledge. And in this paper it is encouraged to increase the
transparency of products including information for the new economy. But
should we increase transparency of sensitive personal information which
is sometimes considered as a good? |
| Location: | Transparency |
| Significance: | We have witnessed many cases
that private personal information is sold and bought as any other
product among government agencies, marketing firms, institutions and so
on. Information security and privacy have raised great attention in
information era which needs to be well settled. So it’s crucial to talk
about the transparency of personal information. |
| Suggestion: | The government
have obligation to protect personal information. There are two possible
ways to do it. The first way is that the government can create
Intelligent Property Rights for private information or knowledge.
For another, some policies should be made to limit the production and
distribution of certain kinds of information product like
sensitive personal information [Richard G.
Harris, The knowledge‐based economy: intellectual orgins and new
economic perspective]. |
| Name: | Volunteer software development |
| Type: | |
| Discussion: |
"Essentially volunteer software development would seem particularly vulnerable to the tragedy of the commons. Open source has, however, evolved a number of strategies that at least ameliorate, and may even overcome, this problem. Open-source authors gain status by writing code. Not only do they receive kudos, but the work can be used as a way to gain marketable reputation. Writing open-source code that becomes widely used and accepted serves as a virtual business card, and helps overcome the lack of transparency in the market for high-level software engineers." |
| Location: | The Market for Software, 11th paragraph |
| Significance: | There is a big industry dealing
with open source software, so there has to be deeper financial issues
that help maintain it. |
| Suggestion: | Open source industry is a
profitable one, if product has quality. Not being open source will not
help if product has little or no value. There are several other ways when this kind of activity provides significant amount of money, like support, training, consulting, provided that product has spread wide enough. Some of big companies with significant incomes are open source (Red Hat), and some are buying out open source products (Sun – MySQL) |
| Name: | 30-day trial offers |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
Many software suites offer 30-trail versions of their products. These are available for download to provide hands on experience using the software and to ensure that there is not compatibility issues. The trials are offered with a smaller sub-set of the features provided with the full version. Each time the software is run, the user is reminded of the trial and prompted to purchase the full version. After the 30-days, the user can only use the software if it is purchased. |
| Location: | The Market for Shareware pgs 8-9 |
| Significance: | -This addresses the issues that the paper was talking about where consumers don't know if the software is what they want before they purchase. The developers are also betting on the user becoming familar with the software package and needing to purchase the full-version in order to continue working with it. |
| Suggestion: | - It is important to be able to
select which features are enough to sell the full-version and which are
too many to make buying the full version necessary. - It is important to track usage and to see how many people try and buy vs. how many only try the software. Tracking feature use in trial versions could also be helpful. - It is important to let users know about features that they can't try out in the free version. |
| Name: | Loss Leaders |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
The selling of a
product at a loss in hopes to entice customers to buy other profitable
products at the same time |
| Location: | The Market for
Software |
| Significance: | It is claimed that the
traditional idea of loss leader products is no longer applicable on
online retailers. I would argue that many have come up with ways
of still making them relevant. |
| Suggestion: | Sites such as
www.amazon.com offer the opportunity to save on shipping with
purchasers over a certain amount. It should be noted that if they
offer a cheaper product on sale at a loss, they can still entice
customers into buying other profitable products in order to pass the
free shipping threshold, thus making the retailer an overall profit on
the full sale. Similarly, giving away freeware or shareware can entice users to pay for "support". |
| Name: | “Kindly Service” |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
Two reasons for online vendors blocking BargainFinder are given, namely “price gouging” and “kindly service.” The discussion of “kindly service” focuses around the personal/humanized nature of vendors and “better”, more targeted browsing interfaces |
| Location: | Of Shop-bots, Online Auctions, and Meta-Sites - Efficiency? |
| Significance: | there are various important
attributes that need to be considered. |
| Suggestion: | I don’t disagree with the separation into price and service related reasons for vendors choosing to boycott shopbots, however I think the “service” portion should be expanded even further. In addition to improved “personal feel” and “better browsing” I think sites differ in many other areas: geographic availability, shipping (pricing, time), availability, and return policies, etc. If a company thinks they are better in any one of these areas that would be reason enough to want to avoid having products included in a listing that is focused around pricing. On the flip side it must be said that in the past years many of the shopbots now include rating systems, customer reviews and sort/filter methods beyond just price. |
| Name: | Shop-bots |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
Shop-bots help the
user find the lowest possible price for a commodity. |
| Location: | Shop-bots
subheading in the Of Shop-bots, Online Auctions, and Meta-Sites section. |
| Significance: | Finding the lowest price is
beneficial for consumers to stimulate rivalry. It would be helpful to
display how businesses can use this as a benefit. |
| Suggestion: | Businesses can use
shop-bots like BargainFinder to find competitive prices for their goods
and services. Shop-bots could be used to find out why a commodity isn't
selling well by allowing the merchant to see if anyone is selling the
commodity for a lower price, as well as, informing the business if they
want to sell a commodity by determining if they can receive a
reasonable profit of the commodity they could carry. |
| Name: | Browsing can lead to future sales |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
Sites that allow
for comparison shopping may be detrimental,
and businesses who take the time to provide information on products
would lose
business to stores offering better prices. |
| Location: | Browsing Is Our Business |
| Significance: | Before the internet, people could still find out information about products for free. They could go look at consumer reports at the library, compare prices in flyers, ads, and catalogues, phone stores, and ask associates in stores for advice. |
| Suggestion: | Comparison
shopping isn’t new; it is just more convenient with the internet.
Though
the article acknowledges this with examples of how people gather and
use
information offline, but not how that had an effect on business before
the
internet came along. There is a high cost of attracting visitors to your website. Becasue of the cost of attracting customers to an e-Business, it is good to get all the exposure that you can. Even if a customer doesn’t buy a product from your store, providing information might still help business in the long run, especially for items that a customer wants to be properly supported after the sale. |
| Name: | Shopping Around |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
Using a retailer’s
recommendation services to find a product, then using a price
comparison to find a better price elsewhere |
| Location: | Browsing is Our
Business |
| Significance: | I would argue that many, if not
most, customers would not do this, thus making recommendation services
worth a retailers time. |
| Suggestion: | This idea should
be presented more as a possibility than as an inevitability. Many
customers who have purchased on Amazon.com in the past would find it
more convenient to just purchase a book from them at a higher price (to
an extent) than to search BargainFinder for a better price and sign up
for a new retailer. |
| Name: | Customer
Information |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
Gaining
information about a customer in order to be able to tailor a storefront
to them |
| Location: | Browsing is Our
Business |
| Significance: | It is suggested that the only
way for an online retailer to learn about a customer is with tracking
their site usage. This is not the case. |
| Suggestion: | The possibility of
having a user fill out a general survey when signing up for the site
should be brought up. While this may not be as accurate as usage
and buying habits over time, it can provide a good starting off point
that can be supplemented with more in depth methods later. |
| Name: | residual value |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
Digital Watermarks try to make each digital copy an unique product to discourage information piracy. |
| Location: | Increasing Excludability |
| Significance: | When buying something in digital form, one is often buying the license to use the product, not that product itself. |
| Suggestion: | While
a book can be bought and resold, a digital copy of the book is harder
to
resell. In digital form, ownership of something has a different
meaning. So
making a digital copy unique does not give it the same value as giving
someone
a physical copy. Thus, the digital copy does not have the same residual
value. People trade the loss of this residual value for the value of convenience in acquiring the data. However, these might not be the only factors involved in such a trade-off. |
| Name: | Tie In Products |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
Holders of digital
intellectual property |
| Location: | Increasing Excludability |
| Significance: | Digital IP holders are said to
have a strong incentive for rivalry and excludability in the digital
market. This does not consider the digital product as an
advertisement for their other products. |
| Suggestion: | While the view of
the article might be true in some cases, sites such as
www.penny-arcade.com, which is a free web comic, makes much of its
money through advertising, but also sells T-Shirts and other
merchandise at a profit
(http://www.foster.washington.edu/about/Pages/AlumniProfileRobertKhoo.aspx
has a profile on Robert Khoo, the business manager behind the site). |
| Name: | Rivalry with information |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
One doesn’t have to lock up information, in order to have rivalry. |
| Location: | Increasing Rivalry |
| Significance: | Exclusivity can have other
dimensions beyond physical exclusivity. With information the temporal
dimennsion can oftem be the most important. |
| Suggestion: | Once content is shared, it no longer is exclusive to one site, but one could have the information out first, and be “the source” for infomaton. There can be a rivalry on how data is presented, in areas such as format, focusing on areas interesting to a particular audience, or added a humorous or entertaining spin. |
| Name: | Preventing Shared
Use |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
Ways in which to
increase rivalry and individual sales |
| Location: | Increasing Rivalry |
| Significance: | A handful of systems to increase
rivalry are suggested, but no concrete examples are given. |
| Suggestion: | Today, services
such as Steam (www.steampowered.com) allow customers to purchase
digital copies of video games and install them on as many computers as
they like. However, Steam requires the customer to be logged into
their servers in order to access and play the games they have
purchased, so that only one copy of that game can be running at any
given time, which achieves a similar result to the traditional physical
media approach. |
| Name: | Customer Loyalty Programs vs. Privacy |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
A short paragraph in "Of Shop-bots, Online Auctions, and Meta-Sites" makes mention of growing popularity of frequent-buyer and other loyalty programs. In addition to various loyalty programs one should make note of the growing number of sites offering/requiring the creation of customer accounts to make purchases online. Once these have been created they can be/are used to create a personalized browsing experience and send targeted advertising via email or SMS (e.g. Amazon) or even keep track of customer/seller feedback (e.g. Ebay). |
| Location: | Of Shop-bots, Online Auctions, and Meta-Sites and Increasing Transparency |
| Significance: | This is an example of sellers
"buying" information from their customers |
| Suggestion: | The effect of having to create customer accounts is not insignificant. Some people may have concerns about their privacy and therefore do not trust certain vendors, while others may simply be lazy and are therefore willing to pay a higher price or deal with poorer service if it means they do not have to create another customer account with a different vendor. There are attempts to remedy this via use of centralized “purchasing account services” such as paypal. Numerous stores allow for quicker checkout using a paypal account (see https://cms.paypal.com/ca/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ca_shop/shops). |
| Name: | Increasing
Transparency by new market technology like prediction markets |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
As
Adam’s market fit reality less well today, there should be some new
market technology developed using new technology in information era
which may fit the world today better. What are they? Are they feasible? |
| Location: | Increasing
Transparency |
| Significance: | Prediction
markets (also known as information markets, decision markets) are
designed for the purpose of making prediction using new techniques and
new computation methods in recent years, and it improves the
transparency. As it is created in the new information era using new
technology, we should concern its utility and contributions to market
theory. |
| Suggestion: | In
complicated situations, the prediction markets can integrate
expectations (informed by facts and expertise) much faster than the
mass media do [Prediction Market, http://www.chrisfmasse.com/]. It
improves the transparency by eliciting information from multiple agents
effectively. Though it does suffer from some inaccuracy problem, but
evidence so far shows that prediction markets are at least as accurate
as other institutions predicting the same events [Prediction Market,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market]. |
| Name: | Unskilled workers |
| Type: | Challenge |
| Discussion: |
Unskilled workers
were plentiful, and much needed in the industrial era but in the next
economy there will be no need for unskilled workers. |
| Location: | 2nd paragraph in
Policy Hazards in the New Economy |
| Significance: | I believe that the need for
unskilled workers will not disappear. |
| Suggestion: | There will always
be a need for unskilled workers, the only part that is going to change
is the definition of unskilled workers. The unskilled workers in the
past are not necessarily unskilled because they needed to learn a set
of skills so that they could accomplish their job. It was not possible
to train a monkey to “watch largely self-running machines and call for
help when they stopped “, or else the merchants would have. In the next
economy the unskilled workers will just need a different set of skills
to become effective in the information era. |
| Name: | The liquidity of
money |
| Type: | Opportunity |
| Discussion: |
how dealing in
transactions through purely digital forms of currency affect the market
|
| Location: | Policy hazards in
the new economy |
| Significance: | The consequences and results of
financial institutes joining the digital market. |
| Suggestion: | Financial
institutions have already joined the digital market, but there are
stoppers to regulate the flow so that it can be precisely regulated as
they start to dabble their feet in this market. The real concern is
when the fluidity of digital exchanges reaches higher potentials.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.51.2460
provides examples for the opportunities and pitfalls of digital moneys. |
| Name: | |
| Type: | |
| Discussion: |
|
| Location: | |
| Significance: | |
| Suggestion: |
Copyright © 2009 - Jim A. Carter Jr.