Property Rights and Information Flows: A Simulation Approach
Property Rights and Information Flows: A Simulation Approach
With the growth of the information economy, the proportion of knowledge-intensive goods to total goods is constantly increasing. Lawrence Lessig has argued that IPRs have now become too favourable to existing producers and that their ‘winner-take-all’ characteristics are constraining the creators of tomorrow. This chapter looks at how variations in IPRs regimes might affect the creation and social cost of new knowledge in economic systems. Drawing on a conceptual framework, the Information Space or I-Space, to explore how the uncontrollable diffusibility of knowledge relates to its degree of structure, this chapter deploys an agent-based modelling approach to the issue of IPRs. It takes the ability to control the diffusibility of knowledge as a proxy measure for an ability to establish property rights in such knowledge. Second, it takes the rate of obsolescence of knowledge as a proxy measure for the degree of turbulence induced by different regimes of technical change. Then, it simulates the quantity and cost to society of new knowledge under different property right regimes.
Keywords: Lawrence Lessig, agent-based simulation, knowledge management, intellectual property rights, evolutionary modelling
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