Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources is available in hard cover, paperback, and for the Kindle. You can purchase the book from
OUP,
Amazon,
Barnes & Noble, among other booksellers.
Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources received the 2012 PROSE Book Award for
the best book in law / legal studies!
Fortunately, there are plenty of reviews; it is good to know some folks are reading the book and have thoughts about it! I have gathered the reviews together on the
Media page. If you are interested in writing a review, please let me know.
I have also put together a list of book events on the
Book Events page. I hope to see you at one of the events!
Below is a brief description of the book and to the right are links to a few sample chapters available on ssrn.com.
Infrastructure resources
are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do
about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural
environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care,
network neutrality regulation and the future of the Internet. Each of these
involves a battle to control infrastructure resources, to establish the terms
and conditions under which the public receives access, and to determine how the
infrastructure and various dependent systems evolve over time.
Infrastructure: The
Social Value of Shared Resources devotes much needed attention to understanding
how society benefits from infrastructure resources and how management decisions
affect a wide variety of interests. The book links infrastructure, a particular
set of resources defined in terms of the manner in which they create value,
with commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is shared
within a community. The infrastructure commons ideas have broad implications
for scholarship and public policy across many fields ranging from traditional
infrastructure like roads to environmental economics to intellectual property
to Internet policy.
Economics has become the
methodology of choice for many scholars and policymakers in these areas. The
book offers a rigorous economic challenge to the prevailing wisdom, which
focuses primarily on problems associated with ensuring adequate supply. The
author explores a set of questions that, once asked, seem obvious: what drives
the demand side of the equation, and how should demand-side drivers affect
public policy? Demand for infrastructure resources involves a range of
important considerations that bear on the optimal design of a regime for
infrastructure management. The book identifies resource valuation and attendant
management problems that recur across many different fields and many different
resource types, and it develops a functional economic approach to understanding
and analyzing these problems and potential solutions.
Chapters available for free download on ssrn.com: