Tag: information-economics
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How Credit Rating Systems Emerged
Credit rating systems exist to solve an information asymmetry problem. Their history, from the first commercial credit reporter to the structured finance failures of 2008, reveals how institutional solutions to market failures can become market failures themselves.
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How Alphabetic Writing Enabled Commerce
From cuneiform clay tablets to Phoenician trade letters, alphabetic writing democratized commercial literacy and made long-distance markets possible. The economic history of script is the economic history of commerce itself.
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How the Printing Press Transformed Information Markets
The printing press was not primarily a cultural event. It was an economic technology that collapsed the marginal cost of copying information and destroyed the monopoly rent that the Church and the scribal class had extracted from information scarcity for a thousand years.
