Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2017
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199684205.013.020
Abstract
Information is of enormous importance to contemporary economics, science, and technology. Since the 1970s, economists and legal scholars, relying on a simplified “public good” model of information, have constructed an impressively extensive body of scholarship devoted to the relationship between law and information. The public good model tends to justify law, such as the intellectual property laws or various forms of securities regulation that seek to incentivize the production of information or its broader dissemination. This chapter reviews the public choice model and identifies two recent trends. First, scholars have extended the public good model of information to an ever-increasing number of fields where law and information intersect. Second, scholars have sharply questioned the simplified model, and ask whether, in practice, information actually has the characteristics of a public good.
Disciplines
Economics | Law | Law and Economics
Recommended Citation
Tim Wu,
Law and Economics of Information,
Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics, Vol. 2: Private and Commercial Law, Francesco Parisi (Ed.), Oxford University Press
(2017).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4363