The economics of sharing
The Economist is running an article on a paper by Yochai Benkler in the Yale Law Journal (PDF) on the economics of sharing. As explained in the article, the recent growth of sharing in technology, such as open source software, has been something of a mystery to economists, but what’s even more interesting is the sharing of actual tangible technology tools like hard drive space and bandwidth, as seen in distributed computing projects and file sharing. As both articles discuss, there are definite pay-backs for those involved, but the trend hasn’t really expanded very much beyond information technology.