The effects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on the information economy and society is an issue that is attracting increasing attention. Marketing and brand management scholarship is exploring the implications of ICTs for brand proliferation and product differentiation....

Libraries tend to be associated with books, but in practice they have lent a variety of media to meet the interests and media practices of their users. Early in the twentieth century, public libraries circulated images, e.g. photographs, prints, and lantern slides. They also lent music scores...

The reconstruction of the international order after World War I put great emphasis on social reforms through the International Labor Organization (ILO). Three types of arguments were used to promote social reform. The first asserted that international economic competition meant that social...

The history of the occupations "author" and "photographer" provides an insightful perspective on copyright and creativity. The concept of the romantic author, associated with personal creative genius, gained prominence in the eighteenth century. However, in the U.S. in 1900 only about three...

This paper documents, from 1925 to the present, some important historical facts about personal activity and commercial efforts to attract personal attention. First, increases in personal time spent with media as the primary focus of activity match closely increases in total personal...

Women's experience of child labor in factories in early nineteenth century England may have increased their psychological susceptibility, both in life-cycle and social-historical trajectories, to non-wage earning roles as mothers. This paper uses as a primary source an official examination into...

The price that a regulated access provider charges for shifting customers between service providers has significant welfare implications. Typical regulatory approaches to pricing, such as pricing based on fully allocated cost or incremental cost, ignore the characteristics of consumer demand. A...

In the deliberations of scholars, policy analysts, and policy makers, television has exceptional power and influence. Yet the historical record shows that television has not changed the economics of attention for large populations in the course of their daily lives. This contrast is not merely a...

This paper considers sex discrimination in the early English cotton factories. Intrinsic differences between men and women offer a less compelling explanation for sex discrimination than much of the literature suggests. A labor sorting model offers an alternative explanation of how...

An acceleration in the growth of communications bandwidth in use and a rapid reduction in bandwidth prices have not accompanied the U.S. economy's strong performance in the second half of the 1990s. Overall U.S. bandwidth in use has grown robustly throughout the 1990s, but growth has not...