Comments on: Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian http://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2008/07/21/information-rules-by-carl-shapiro-and-hal-varian/ Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:12:49 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || California, here I come || August || 2008 http://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2008/07/21/information-rules-by-carl-shapiro-and-hal-varian/comment-page-1/#comment-168784 Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || California, here I come || August || 2008 Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:41:33 +0000 http://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2008/07/21/information-rules-by-carl-shapiro-and-hal-varian/#comment-168784 [...] Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian [...] [...] Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian [...]

]]> By: peter http://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2008/07/21/information-rules-by-carl-shapiro-and-hal-varian/comment-page-1/#comment-166864 peter Sat, 26 Jul 2008 11:58:22 +0000 http://www.nehrlich.com/blog/2008/07/21/information-rules-by-carl-shapiro-and-hal-varian/#comment-166864 Economics promises so much, but the process of abstraction used to generate economic theories, always means it fails to deliver in particular cases. There is a joke among marketers that marketing only exists because the assumptions of economics are false. One of those assumptions is that there are such things as commodities. If in any real marketplace, a true commodity exists, then some marketing manager is not doing his or her job. Even natural resources, such as coal, are not commodities in the sense understood by mainstream economists, since factors such as the quality of the resource from a paricular location, the time and costs of delivery from and to particular locations, the likelihood of strikes disrupting supply, etc, enable buyers to differentiate between different sources of supply. Talk to Australian coal miners, competing against their counterparts in Brazil for contracts in China and Japan, and you won't hear anyone mention the word "commodity". Economics promises so much, but the process of abstraction used to generate economic theories, always means it fails to deliver in particular cases. There is a joke among marketers that marketing only exists because the assumptions of economics are false.

One of those assumptions is that there are such things as commodities. If in any real marketplace, a true commodity exists, then some marketing manager is not doing his or her job. Even natural resources, such as coal, are not commodities in the sense understood by mainstream economists, since factors such as the quality of the resource from a paricular location, the time and costs of delivery from and to particular locations, the likelihood of strikes disrupting supply, etc, enable buyers to differentiate between different sources of supply. Talk to Australian coal miners, competing against their counterparts in Brazil for contracts in China and Japan, and you won’t hear anyone mention the word “commodity”.

]]>