The Business Governance of Localized Knowledge: An Information Economics Approach for the Economics of Knowledge

Information economics provides important tools to articulate an economics analysis of the governance mechanisms for the generation and exploitation of localized technological knowledge. A variety of hybrid forms of knowledge governance ranging from coordinated transactions and constructed interactions to quasi-hierarchies can be found between the two unrealistic extremes of pure markets and pure organizations. The notion of localized technological knowledge as a highly heterogeneous dynamic process characterized by varying levels of appropriability, tacitness, unpredictability and indivisibility, which take the forms of complementarity and modularity, cumulability, compositeness, fungibility, helps to grasp the logic behind the variety of knowledge governance mechanisms at work. The analysis of transaction, agency and communication costs provides basic guidance to elaborate an integrated framework able to understand the matching between types of knowledge and modes and mechanisms of knowledge governance both in generation and exploitation.