The Chronicle of Higher Education provides a useful summary of the OS-Liebowitz debate on file sharing we’ve been following for a while (thanks to David Glenn for the tip). I like this description of the original piece by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf…

Read the full piece here. 

Mike Jensen, the distinguished financial economist and co-founder of SSRN, is interviewed here by Growthology’s Tim Kane. Everyone knows that electronic distribution of working papers has been extremely important for academic research in business and the social sciences. By the time most papers are published, they’ve already been read by many, if not most, of the target readers, from working-paper circulation, conference presentations, informal discussions, and the like. Jensen points out that electronic distribution has also had an important democratization effect. The elites always had access to cutting-edge research in advance of publication through informal networks, NBER workshops, and the like. “In my own field, I was part of a very small group doing cutting-edge work in the early days of modern finance, and I noticed that elites in all fields were 2-3 years ahead of other scholars just because they knew about research that took so much time to get distributed widely. The Internet allowed everyone to see the frontier.”

Read the full piece here.

My colleague Thom Lambert has a nice piece on Britney Spears over at Truth on the Market. Yes, really. Thom asks whether Britney’s popularity, which seems unrelated to intrinsic merit, is due to network effects — people are interested in her because other people are interested in her, and so on — leading us down an irreversible path toward Britneymania. Paul David, call your office! Britney, Thom suggests, may be like the QWERTY keyboard — grossly inefficient but hard to replace.

Read the full piece here.

Ben Klein’s new paper, “The Economic Lessons of Fisher Body – General Motors,” appears in the February 2007 issue of the International Journal of the Economics of Business. He is not about to give Ronald Coase the last word. Indeed, Klein writes, the newest evidence on the history of the relationship between Fisher and GM confirms his earlier claim that GM’s acquisition of Fisher in 1926 was a response to opportunistic behavior by Fisher. This evidence…

Read the full piece here.

The Sunday New York Times features a lengthy, and mostly unflattering, look at the University of Phoenix, the world’s largest for-profit university. The tenor of the Times piece is set by the headline, “Troubles Grow for a University Built on Profits” — the p-word clearly chosen to shock the Times’s modal reader. (Where were the stories on the Times’s Judith Miller scandal titled “Troubles Grow for a Newspaper Built on Profits”?)

Read the full piece here.