The growth of the Internet raises a range of interesting questions for the economist, a number of which have already been
extensively investigated in the literature. A few books and many journal articles have been published covering relevant topics.
I am attempting to maintain a full list of relevant material, but my comments below are designed to help you get started.
Jeffrey H Rohlfs is the person who first recognised the importance of network externalities in network industries when he was working for the Bell telephone company in the 1970s. His recent book
Bandwagon Effects in High Technology Industries, MIT Press (2001), provides an excellent account
of the concept and the closely related "bandwagon effect". One chapter is specifically about the economics of the Internet.
You can also find online a conference paper by Rolhfs Bandwagon Effects and the Internet, again written in 2001 and I strongly recommend you to read this.
Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, by Carl Shapiro and Hal R Varian, focuses on the economics of information goods.
It will be relevant to later parts of the course where we consider competitive strategies for the information economy. The book is easy to read (it is largely non-technical) and
provides excellent explanations of concepts such as "switching costs", "lock-in", "versioning" and "value-based pricong". You can read
reviews of Shapiro and Varian's book online.
Together with Joseph Farrell, Varian and Shapiro have also written another interesting book called The Economics of Information Technology that you
might like to look at for background reading.
Oz Shy has also been active in research on the economics of networks and his book The Economics of Network Industries, Cambridge University Press (2001), contains quite a lot of material
that is useful for this module. There are separate chapters on the Hardware Industry, the Software Industry, Technology Advance and Standardization, Telecommunication
and Markets for Information.
Michael R Baye edits an annual research volume called Advances in Applied Microeconomics, published by Elsevier Science. Volume 11 (2002) is called
The Economics of the Internet and E-Commerce and it contains a number of interesting papers.
Shane Greenstein's collection of papers written for IEEE Micro,
Diamonds Are Forever, Computers Are Not has now been published by Imperial College Press (2004) and it contains some very readable material on the economics of the Internet.
Another recently published book that you might want to look at is The Long Tail
by Chris Anderson. See also the
promotional material and the blog that Anderson has set up to discuss the issues raised in the book.
The recommended textbook for the technical background on computer networks and the Internet is Andrew S Tanenbaum's Computer Networks
, Prentice Hall - now in it's Fourth Edition. Tanenbaum is Professor of Computer Science at the Vrijie University in Amsterdam. You can find out more about him
from his website . His book is rather technical for economics students, but is a quite a good starting place for people who know nothing about computer networks and the associated protocols.
My book Computing Skills for Economists covers a wide range of topics, most not directly relevant to this module.
However Chapter 6, The Internet for Economists, is relevant and contains information about important web sites for economists, electronic newletters and discussion lists etc.
The book's links page will connect you to many of the sites that I mention on this module.
Many journals are now published in electronic form on the World Wide Web (you may
have to provide a user name and password to confirm that you are a subscriber, or the system may be able to detect that your
computer belongs to an organization that subscribes to the journal).
Your browser will need to have been configured so that you can read Portable Document Format (PDF) files
(or those produced by an alternative page display system).
A number of news and media organisations provide a news alert service where you can have links to key stories in the news e-mailed to you on a regular basis.
Here are some other useful links
Books
Two of the first books to be published containing material on the economics of the Internet and the digital economy were
collections of conference papers: Internet Economics edited by L W McKnight and J P Bailey (MIT Press, 1997)
(also available online from the Journal of Electronic Publishing, May, 1996 Volume 2, Issue 1 and
Understanding the Digital Economy: Data, Tools and Research
edited by Erik Brynjolfsson and Brian Kahin (MIT Press, 2000) - also available online.
I shall refer to a number of the papers in these collections on some of the topics that we look at and you are recommended to read them. Journals
You can find a number of relevant papers in established economic journals, such as
the American Economic Review, the European Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the Journal of Industrial Economics and the
Oxford Review of Economic Policy (make sure that you look at the papers in the special issue of the OREP on the Economics of the Internet - Volume 17 No 2, 2001).
There are also a number of new specialist journals springing up that are relevant to us
such as Information Economics and Policy, the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce,
and Netnomics.Newspapers, magazines and other periodicals
Newspapers such as the Guardian and Financial Times (FT) are available online and it is worth ckecking their archives for news
stories and other information about the Internet. Other very good sources are The Economist
and the BBC web sites. The Guardian and the BBC still provide unlimited and free
access to all material, but other organizations tend to limit access except for paying subscribers. This increasing trend "from free to fee" will be discussed later in the course.
Online introductions to the Internet
For some good introductory tutorial material on the Internet try About.com's Learn the Net site,
perhaps starting with The Birth of the Net and Net Anatomy.
The site also includes a helpful online glossary.
This Page maintained by Guy
Judge <Guy.Judge@port.ac.uk>
Page Last Updated:
March 2009
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