The author systematically examines one of the important issues of information — establishing the market price. He introduces the concept of «search» — where a buyer wanting to get a better price, is forced to question sellers. The article deals with various aspects of finding the necessary information.

Economics of Information

An overview of the self-organizing map algorithm, on which the papers in this issue are based, is presented in this article.

The Self-Organizing Map

The Theory of Monopolistic Competition.

The Long Tail: How Technology is turning mass markets into millions of niches. (p. 15). This passage from The Long Tail, pretty much sums it all up. The Long Tail by Chris Anderson is a good and worthwhile read for information scientists, computer scientists, ecommerce researchers, and others interested in all areas of Web research. The central premise of the book is that the combination of (1) the Pareto or Zipf distribution (i.e., power law probability distribution) that is characteristic of Web traffic and (2) the direct access to consumers via Web technology has opened up new business opportunities in the ''long tail''. Producers and advertisers no longer have to target ''the big hits'' at the head of the distribution. Instead, they can target the small, niche communities or even individuals in the tail of the distribution. The long tail is has been studied by Web researchers and has been noted in term usage on search engines, access times to servers, and popularity of Web sites. Andersen points out that the long tail also applies to products sold on the Web. He recounts that a sizeable percentage of Amazon sales come from books that only sell a few copies, a large number of songs from Rhapsody get downloaded only once in a month, and a significant number of movies from Netflix only get ordered occasionally. However, since the storage is in digital form for the songs and music (and Amazon out sources the storage of books) there is little additional inventory cost of these items. This phenomenon across all Web companies has led to a broadening of participation by both producers and consumers that would not have happened without the Web. The idea of the long tail is well known, of course. What Anderson has done is present it in an interesting manner and in a Web ecommerce setting. He applies it to Web businesses and then relates the multitude of other factors ongoing that permit the actual implementation of the long tail effect. Anderson also expands on prior work on the long tail by introducing an element of time, given the distribution a three dimensional effect. All in all, it is a nifty idea. The book is comprised of 14 chapters, plus an Introduction. Chapter 1 presents an overview of what the long tail is. Chapter 2 discusses the ''head'', which is the top of the tail where the …

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

This paper addresses the scope for more integrated general analysis of diversity in science, technology and society. It proposes a framework recognizing three necessary but individually insufficient properties of diversity. Based on 10 quality criteria, it suggests a general quantitative non-parametric diversity heuristic. This allows the systematic exploration of diversity under different perspectives, including divergent conceptions of relevant attributes and contrasting weightings on different diversity properties. It is shown how this heuristic may be used to explore different possible trade-offs between diversity and other aspects of interest, including portfolio interactions. The resulting approach offers a way to be more systematic and transparent in the treatment of scientific and technological diversity in a range of fields, including conservation management, research governance, energy policy and sustainable innovation.

A General Framework for Analysing Diversity in Science, Technology and Society

Web 2.0 works with the principle of weak cooperation, where a huge amount of individual contributions build solid and structured sources of data. In this paper, we detail the main properties of this weak cooperation by illustrating them on the photo publication website Flickr, showing the variety of uses producing a rich content and the various procedures devised by Flickr users themselves to select quality. We underlined the interaction between small and heavy users as a specific form of collective production in large social networks communities. We also give the main statistics on the (5M-users, 150M-photos) data basis we worked on for this study, collected from Flickr website using the public API.

/pdf/the-stength-of-weak-cooperation-a-case-study-on-flickr-2dwhis7hs2.pdf

The Stength of Weak cooperation: A Case Study on Flickr

Histoires de dispositifs: (introduction)

This article examines the promise of market democratization conveyed by consumer rating and review websites in the restaurant industry. Based on interviews with website administrators and data from the main French platforms, we show that review websites contribute to the democratization of restaurant criticism, which first started in the 1970s, both by including a greater variety of restaurants in the reviews, and by broadening participation, opening restaurant reviewing to all. However, this twofold democratic ambition conflicts with the need to produce fair and helpful recommendations, leading review websites to seek compromises between these two dimensions.

/pdf/a-democratization-of-markets-online-consumer-reviews-in-the-48m7wjgobg.pdf

A “Democratization” of Markets? Online Consumer Reviews in the Restaurant Industry

In recent years, web sites where individual consumers can rate and review goods and services have mushroomed all over the Internet. Restaurants are particularly affected by online reviewing. If the impact of online consumer reviews (OCRs) on the demand side of markets is now well understood and measured, few studies examine the reception of this new evaluation method by those who are assessed. Based on interviews with French restaurant managers, our research shows that OCRs systems reconfigure relations of accountability in the restaurant industry. We use the notion of reactivity to describe the mechanisms through which the new evaluation system transforms the activity of restaurants. We also examine the affects surrounding the reception of ratings and reviews by restaurant managers and the moral criteria that accompany their discourses on online reviews. Many restaurants consider online reviews as a brutal and hypocritical mode of judgment. The judgment produced by online ratings and reviews is n...

/pdf/reactivity-without-legitimacy-online-consumer-reviews-in-the-4m30madfpf.pdf

Reactivity without legitimacy? Online consumer reviews in the restaurant industry

Resume Napster, systeme horizontal d'echange de fichiers musicaux, est un cas exemplaire de dispositif sociotechnique ouvert, objet d'interpretations contradictoires. Nous examinons ici deux grands recits du fonctionnement de l'innovation Napster : le premier envisage le dispositif comme une communaute d'echange autoregulee, emblematique de l'avenement d'un nouveau mode de regulation sociale fonde sur le don ; le second l'analyse a l'inverse comme un dispositif de consommation, regi par le calcul et les comportements opportunistes, et precurseur des structures d'un marche de la musique en ligne. Par l'observation empirique de la genese et des usages du dispositif, nous montrons que ces interpretations en occultent la dimension technique et surestiment la mise en œuvre par les usagers de leur competence morale ou de calcul. La regulation du collectif releve plutot de la solidarite technique, dans laquelle les calculs et les actions morales des utilisateurs composent avec les instances plus ou moins contraignantes et eclatees du systeme technique.

Jean-Samuel Beuscart

Papers

The Stength of Weak cooperation: A Case Study on Flickr

Histoires de dispositifs: (introduction)

A “Democratization” of Markets? Online Consumer Reviews in the Restaurant Industry

Reactivity without legitimacy? Online consumer reviews in the restaurant industry

Les usagers de Napster, entre communauté et clientèle Construction et régulation d'un collectif sociotechnique