Digital economy

Digital economy refers to an economy that is based on digital computing technologies. The digital economy is also sometimes called the Internet Economy, the New Economy, or Web Economy. Increasingly, the “digital economy” is intertwined with the traditional economy making a clear delineation harder. It comes from the same ideas or others types of economis as:

• Information economy: is an economy with an increased emphasis on informational activities and information industry.
• Virtual economy: is an emergent economy existing in a virtual world, usually exchanging virtual goods in the context of an Internet game

Some states that the three main components of the ‘Digital Economy’ concept can be identified:

• Supporting infrastructure (hardware, software, telecoms, networks, etc.),
• e-business (how business is conducted, any process that an organization conducts over computer-mediated networks),
• e-commerce (transfer of goods, for example when a book is sold online).

Digital Economy has been defined as the branch of economics studying zero marginal cost intangible goods over the Net.

See also

Material

• http://archive.oii.ox.ac.uk/odec/

Papers

• Terranova, T. (2000). Free labor: Producing culture for the digital economy. Social text, 18(2), 33-58.
• Brynjolfsson, E., Hu, Y., & Smith, M. D. (2003). Consumer surplus in the digital economy: Estimating the value of increased product variety at online booksellers. Management Science, 49(11), 1580-1596.

Books

• Tapscott, Don (1997). The digital economy: promise and peril in the age of networked intelligence. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Ghosh, R. (2006). CODE: Collaborative ownership and the digital economy. MIT Press.