Economic Analysis of Urban Spatial Structure in Information Society

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Setting a nonmonocentric model where a firm can locate its two sectors, head-office and routine-function offices at different places, we have analyzed the possible patterns in equibrium of spatial distribution of firms and households, distance between the head-office and routine-function of a firm, wage profile, and land rent structure. The conditions for each pattern to emerge are particularly examined in detail with focusing on the costs for transaction and communication carried out by respective sectors of a firm.As information technology pervades firms, trips for communication made by routine-functinory sector will be substituted by telecommunication methods so that the communication cost per unit distance for that sector is lowered, On the other hand, the face-to-face contacts made by the head-office are not replaced by means of information collected and transmitted there is Cf high grade. The urban configuration in equilibrium varies depending on the communication cost of a firm relative to the other parameters, in particular, the commuting cost. An interesting observation is that, where "informationization" develops most, firms are decentralized in a city but their two functions are located at the some places, whereby the distance of trips for face-to-face contracts at the trading center will be longer than before the introduction of information technology. It is at the middle stage of the pervasion of information technology that that the head-office and routine-function office of a firm are located separately from each other.