What does the cost of information have to do with microeconomics?

The U. S. is moving from an industrial economy to a information economy, so what are the costs associated with an information society?|||You're not asking so much for the "cost of information" as you are for the cost of developing new skills in the workforce. The cost of information would be relevant to a question having to do with the issue of incomplete information and how information about the market is acquired by companies and individuals.





As for the costs of transformation to an information economy, they are many and the consequences are varied and bring up additional costs themselves. The most immediate cost would involve retraining old workers and educating new workers for non-industrial jobs. Of course, the removal of industrial production capabilities in the economy creates its own costs--companies who relied on local producers may find themselves paying more to import products, even if it is cheaper for the producing company to build the products overseas. There are further attendant costs to that, even, but this should give you an overview of the situation.|||This is a wrong-headed question.





1. The U.S. is NOT moving from an industrial economy to an information economy because it hasn't been an industrial economy. The U.S. has been primarily a service economy for decades.





2. The term "information economy" doesn't replace "industrial" or "service" it suffuses them. Both the production of goods and the production of services have to make more and better use of information to survive.





3. There is a cost to the information itself, but relatively speaking, it is negligible. As the other answer noted, making use of it effectively is expensive because it involves change: people have to learn, processes have to be changed, equipment (computers, communication equipment, etc.) has to be purchased and installed, and much older equipment depreciated as obsolete.





4. Then there is the macro-economic cost to the move to an information economy. One example is the growth of the financial industry.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/17/opinio鈥?/a>





5. Independent of all that is the role of information in micro-economics. Classical economic theory talks about perfect markets with perfect information.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_com鈥?/a>


That clearly doesn't exist and never will. But only recently have we seen economics theories that begin to deal with information assymetries.


http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/econo鈥?/a>


http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst鈥?/a>


http://eidelblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/ho鈥?/a>