Economics Of Information

Some ideas and observations about the economics of information:

EricVonHippel proposes that information is sticky, so it's difficult both to give a designer all of the technical engineering knowledge to implement their design, and to give an engineer all of the design knowledge to fulfill the designer's vision. Solution? Create a software kit of modular parts embodying the technical knowledge so that the designer can prototype the application and the engineer can optimize it later.
Another observation is that many of the tools, concepts and paradigms are used to prevent meta-information loss at the system level, and often to encourage more complete erasure of lower level information by packaging it (eg, objects). Meta-information is generally more valuable than low-level information.
Yet another observation is that in any system with limited resources, information loss is required in order to free up resources, and incomplete erasure can lead to serious problems. The higher level that information is, the more meta- it is, the more serious the problems its incomplete erasure entails.
Another tidbit is that there is an opportunity cost to knowledge. Inaccurate knowledge prevents the acquisition of accurate knowledge. And even accurate knowledge prevents the acquisition of substantially different knowledge on the same subject. Knowledge is observed to obey quantum mechanical laws of superposition only under strict laboratory conditions. EmptyYourCup is motivated by this.

Some people doubted I could produce the reference, and rightly so since I never bother, but on page 102 of SourcesOfInnovation by EricVonHippel:

Root of the Problem: Marketing Research Constrained by User Experience

Users selected to provide input data to consumer and industrial market analysis have an important limitation: Their insights into new product (and process and service) needs and potential solutions are constrained by their real-world experience. Users steeped in the present are, thus, unlikely to generate novel product concepts that conflict with the familiar.

The notion that familiarity with existing product attributes and uses interferes with an individual's ability to conceive of novel attributes and uses is strongly supported by research into problem solving (Table 8-1). We see that experimental subjects familiar with a complicated problem-solving strategy are unlikely to devise a simpler one when this is appropriate.(3) Also, and germane, to our present discussion, we see that subjects who use an object or see it used in a familiar way are strongly blocked from using that object in a novel way.(4) Furthermore, the more recently objects or problem-solving strategies have been used in a familiar way, the more difficult subjects find it to employ them in a novel way.(5) Finally, we see that the same effect is displayed in the real world, where the success of a research group in solving a new problem is shown to depend on whether solutions it has used in the past will fit that new problem.(6) These studies thus suggest that typical users of existing products - the type of user-evaluators customarily chosen in market research - are poorly situated with regard to the difficult problem-solving tasks associated with assessing unfamiliar product and process needs.

http://web.mit.edu/evhippel/www/books/sources/Chapter8.pdf