We analyze a large-scale custom software effort, the Worm Community system (WCS), a collaborative system designed for a geographically dispersed community of geneticists. There were complex challenges in creating this infrastructural tool, ranging from simple lack of resources to complex organizational and intellectual communication failures and tradeoffs. Despite high user satisfaction with the system and interface, and extensive user needs assessment, feedback and analysis, many users experienced difficulties in signing on and use. The study was conducted during a time of unprecedented growth in the Internet and its utilities (1991-1994), and many respondents turned to the World Wide Web for their information exchange. Using Bateson’s model of levels of learning, we analyze the levels of infrastructural complexity involved in system access and designeruser communication. We analyze the connection between systems development aimed at supporting specific forms of collaborative knowledge work, local organizational transformation, and large-scale infrastructural change.

Can high quality be provided economically for all transmissions on the Internet? Current work assumes that it cannot, and concentrates on providing differentiated service levels. However, an examination of patterns of use and economics of data networks suggests that providing enough bandwidth for uniformly high quality transmission may be practical. If this turns out not to be possible, only the simplest schemes that require minimal involvement by end users and network administrators are likely to be accepted. On the other hand, there are substantial inefficiencies in the current data networks, inefficiencies that can be alleviated even without complicated pricing or network engineering systems.

A marked acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in U.S. manufacturing followed World War I. This development contributed substantially to the absolute and relative rise of the domestic economy’s aggregate TFP residual, which is observed when the “growth accounts ” for the first quarter of the twentieth century are compared with those for the second half of the nineteenth century. Two visions of the dynamics of productivity growth are germane to an understanding of these developments. One emphasizes the role of forces affecting broad sections of the economy, through spillovers of knowledge and the diffusion of general purpose technologies (GPTs). The second view considers that possible sources of productivity increase are multiple and idiosyncratic. Setting aside possible measurement errors, the latter approach regards sectoral and economy-wide surges of TFP growth to be simply the result of aggregating over many essentially independent underlying cost reductions, some of which carried more weight than others. Although there is room for both views in an analysis of the sources of the

The Internet is the latest in a long succession of communication technologies. The goal of this work is to draw lessons from the evolution of all these services. Little attention is paid to technology as such, since that has changed radically many times. Instead, the stress is on the steady growth in volume of communication, the evolution in the type of traffic sent, the qualitative change this growth produces in how people treat communication, and the evolution of pricing. The focus is on the user, and in particular on how quality and price differentiation have been used by service providers to influence consumer behavior, and how consumers have reacted.

In this essay we reflect on the relevance of early twentieth century experience for understanding the more general phenomenon of recurring prolonged swings in the TFP growth rate in advanced industrial economies. Our discussion builds upon our recent re-examination of the marked acceleration of the pace of total factor productivity growth that occurred in U.S. manufacturing following World War I (David and Wright 1999). After a Aproductivity pause @ of some three decades, during which gross manufacturing output grew at less than one percent per annum relative to inputs of capital and labor, TFP in this sector expanded at more than five percent per annum between 1919 and 1929. This remarkable discontinuity has often been overlooked by modern productivity analysts and economic historians alike; yet it contributed substantially to the absolute and relative rise of the US domestic economy=s TFP residual, and in many respects launched the high-growth era that persisted into the 1970s. Upon closer scrutiny, this implied shift in the prevailing technological regime can be traced to critical advances in the electrification of industry, which we interpret as a phase in the diffusion of a general purpose technology (GPT) that made possible significant fixed-capital savings while simultaneously increasing labor productivity as well. But a purely technological explanation of the productivity surge is inadequate. It would neglect the concurrence of these developments with important structural changes in US labor markets, and

Abstract. Technology appears to be making fine-scale charging (as in tolls on roads that depend on time of day or even on current and anticipated levels of congestion) increasingly feasible. And such charging appears to be increasingly desirable, as traffic on roads continues to grow, and costs and public opposition limit new construction. Similar incentives towards fine-scale charging also appear to be operating in communications and other areas, such as electricity usage. Standard economic theory supports such measures, and technology is being developed and deployed to implement them. But their spread is not very rapid, and prospects for the future are uncertain. This paper presents a collection of sketches, some from ancient history, some from current developments, that illustrate the costs that charging imposes. Some of those costs are explicit (in terms of the monetary costs to users, and the costs of implementing the charging mechanisms). Others are implicit, such as the time or the mental processing costs of users. These argue that the case for fine-scale charging is not unambiguous, and that in many cases may be inappropriate. 1

. This is a study of emergent economic order---order that is the result of human action but not human design. I study a coordination game in which locally connected agents act without deliberation. Their locally optimal actions propagate through neighbors to others, and coalitions form adaptively. I map the game onto a hypercube and develop a connectionist model of it. Simulation results show that the process is self-organizing and evolves to optimal or near-optimal equilibria; the agent network computes the core of the game. Its equilibria are path-dependent and the dynamic may become trapped on local optima; broken symmetry and noise promote evolution to global optima. Primary field (17), self-organization and emergent behavior; secondary field (16), information and learning. 1. Introduction When economic institutions and the actions of agents are well-adapted, a coherence and regularity is revealed in behavior at a macroscopic level of observation and we say there is economic orde...

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Since the advent of the world-wide web, academic researchers have constructed web pages to present a view of themselves, their work, their associations and their interests. This novel form of self-presentation has drawn a lot of attention over the past few years, prompting not only psychologists, but also social analysts, educators and software developers, to reflect on the ways in which technology pervades our self-presentations. Personal home pages are not, however, the only way in which scientists present themselves through technology construction and use—nor even the primary way. In this paper, we examine the technologies that oceanographers use to manage professional identity within their sociotechnical networks.