ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF INFORMATION SERVICES

I had somedifficulty in deciding what title to use for this note. Perhaps I should have called it ‘Economic Science and Information Science’ but I have an old‐fashioned prejudice against using the word ‘science’ for disciplines less rigorous than those of the natural sciences. Moreover, my real purpose is to examine how far we are justified in applying the concepts of economics to decisions about information services. Of course I appreciate that with the growing cost of information services and with the growing profusion of possible types of services it would be very useful if we could use the concepts of any discipline to make rational decisions about information services. If we could, then ‘information science’ would become truly ‘scientific’ in the sense I normally use that word.