"Impacts of Information Technology on Society: Information, Intellectual Property and Coordination Mechanism"(in Japanese)

We analyzed the effects of the progress and propagation of information technology on economic activity and the form of economic organizations from three different viewpoints. First, drastic reduction of information production and information processing costs produced the bursts of information, the rapid change of economy activity, and the globalization of economy. Second is the digitalization of goods and services, which made unbundling of information written in digital signal from the medium possible. With such technology, one can duplicate information perfectly with nominal cost only. This makes information pure public good and creates the serious problem of appropriation. The last and the most importantly, we discuss the digitalization of coordination. Progress of the informational and communication technology makes coordination more accurate and inexpensive. This makes the electronic coordination between parts and organization easier and less costly. This promotes the unbundling of parts or elements that had been bundled because of technical reason and rebundle them in much more natural way. We argue that this brings about the phenomena often described as modularization and open-architecture.