Anamaria Berea (University of Maryland)
Abstract. Economic theories of information focus on the peculiarities of information as an economic good that can be public (non-rival — its consumption does not decrease its quantity, and non-excludable — one cannot prevent the access to it) or private (non-rival and excludable). There is also a large body research in economics that focuses on asymmetric information problems in a market setting. In any of these situations, information is essentially treated as a homogeneous good. In this research we start with the assumption that information is an economic good that is "near" non-rival, "near" non-excludable and heterogeneous. We subsequently built an agent-based model of information exchange where we implemented these fundamental principles of the economics of information in pairwise interactions of ontological networks. These networks can learn, forget and adapt informationally through interactions with the environment and/or each other and we explored various scenarios of communication. We show which are the conditions that differentiate social from biological communication and the communication complexities that arise when we scale from 2 networks interactions to 3 networks interactions.