Friday, September 26, 2014

Marketing term: Arrow Information Paradox

The Arrow information paradox named after Kenneth Arrow, American economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks, is a problem that companies face when managing intellectual property across their boundaries. This happens when they seek external technologies for their business or external markets for their own technologies. It has implications for the value of technology and innovations as well as their development by more than one firm and for the need for and limitations of patent protection. A fundamental tenet of the paradox is that the customer, i.e. the potential purchaser of the information describing a technology (or other information having some value, such as facts), wants to know the technology and what it does in sufficient detail as to understand its capabilities or have information about the facts or products to decide whether or not to buy it.If the buyer trusts the seller, or is protected via contract, then they only need to know the results that the technology will provide, along with any caveats for its usage in a given context. A problem is that sellers lie, they may be mistaken.

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