Study of Economic Information System and the Supply of Its Services

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The objective of this study is (i) to design an economic information system which facilitates exchange and distribution of transaction information among individual economic agents, thereby advancing their coordination and adjustments, and (ii) to investigate economic and policy implications of such a system. To do this, we pay special attention to the recent development of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), which has been informatizing transactions among business firms. In particular, we attempt to draw an outline of a new system celled "Economic Information System" which collects transaction information by sampling from the messages transmitted on EDI, produces from them electronic statistical data, and publishes them electronically. Such a system would have to be constructed as a public project at least initially, since the benefits from the system would be small in the beginning, although the benefits will be greater when the system is fully developed. The Economic Information System would supply individual agents of the information about the behavior and the decision of other agents at the micro-economic, industrial-, macro-economic-, and international-economic levels ; it will reduce risk and uncertainty to individual agents, decrease the damage from disequilibrium and business fluctuations, and increase the efficiency of the economic activities of a nation and the world as a whole. On the other hand, such a system would provide services which have the property of public goods ; we therefore consider some of the economic issues like competition, monopoly, regulation of the system.