Information Technology and the Biodiversity of Capitalism

It is often claimed that the recent advances in information technology have some definitive organizational implications for advanced capitalist economies and, more specifically, to imply a convergence towards a single model of a more "decentralized" market economy. This paper challenges this view on two grounds. In the first place, we observe that the changes in information technology have rather ambiguous effects on the organization of the economy and its property right structure. In the second place, we observe that, because of these ambiguities, it is also important to consider the opposite direction of causality that runs from property rights to the types of information technologies that are applied. For both reasons, we argue that the "Biodiversity" of capitalism is not going to be eliminated by the new information technologies and that different distribution of property rights and asymmetric information will continue to characterize the different economies