Information economics and the Internet

Information economics offers insights into the dynamics of information acro ss networked systems like the Internet. An information marketplace is diffe rent from other marketplaces because an information good is not actually co nsumed and can be reproduced and distributed at almost no cost. For informa tion producers to remain profitable, they will need to minimize their expos ure to competition. For example, information can be sold by charging site a ccess rather than information access fees, or it can be bundled with other information or "versioned." For information consumers, a variation of Malth us' law predicts that the exponential growth in information will mean that specific information will become increasingly expensive to find, because se arch costs will grow but human attention will remain limited. Furthermore, the low cost of creating poor-quality information on the Web means that the low-quality information may eventually swamp high-quality resources. The u se of reputable information portals on the Web, or smart search technologie s, may help in the short run, but it is unclear whether an "information fam ine" is avoidable in the longer term.