Library · Tag

Markets

An annotated collection of 3 books, papers & articles on markets, spanning 1987 to 2014. Featuring works by Thomas Malone, Thomas Sowell, Adam Davidson — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.

Electronic Markets and Electronic Hierarchies

Thomas Malone, Joanne Yates & Robert Benjamin, 1987 · Communications of the ACM, Vol. 30, No. 6

The paper that connects Coase to the digital era. Information technology reduces transaction costs, and that pushes activity toward markets and away from hierarchies. When coordinating outside is cheap, firms shrink. It…

Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy

Thomas Sowell, 2000 · Basic Books (5th edition, 2014)

Sowell teaches economics through examples and without equations. The book's claim is that most policy debates are muddled because people do not have a clear picture of how prices, incentives and tradeoffs actually work —…

Thinking Outside the (Big) Box

Adam Davidson, 2014 · The New York Times Magazine

Davidson writes economic journalism in a register that is rare and useful: he takes a specific industry or firm and walks through why it looks the way it does, with numbers concrete enough to argue with. This piece belon…