IRI-9505561 Marschak, Thomas University of California-Berkeley $450,000 - 36 mos The Information Superhighway and the Decentralization of Organizations The "Information Superhighway" promises to lead to the massive dispersion of information-handling activities. What does a large organization lose and what does it gain when it replaces face-to- face exchange of information among a large group of persons with decentralizion to many remote sites? How does a decentralized organization, which has a common task, make the best use of the information infrastructure that ties it together? How should the costs of the infrastructure, and of the local networks that connect to it, be measured and how should the costs be divided up among the users. This research project aims to clarify and study these complex questions. One segment of the program is the modeling of real organizations; another is the development of new theory; and a third is the empirical study of a continually accumulating database on Internet usage at Berkeley, which will convert into a "testbed" for the experimental study of alternative schemes for allocating network resources among users. One aim of the empirical work is the (paper) design of an "On- line University". In all parts of the research project, problems will be studied from the viewpoints of several disciplines: economics, computer science, electrical engineering, and operations research.
