Knowledge, Information, Rules, and Structures

Knowledge is frequently defined as separate from information and as existing only in the heads of people. To the contrary, information is critical to a pragmatic approach to knowledge consistent with epistemic game theory. Such information is frequently protected by intellectual property claims, re-inforcing their importance as knowledge assets in an economy and in society. Moreover, knowledge exists at the group, firm, and system level through the organizational coordination of individuals. Individuals may enter and exit, but work is still coordinated. In an age where increasingly work is accomplished through intelligent machines, an understanding of social rules and mechanisms is critical for the analysis of the generative rules that guide the structure of knowledge in an economy and society. This point is demonstrated through a simple simulation of three rules (random, preferential, and transitive) that generate three distinctive network structures. In this perspective, knowledge is structure and structure is the network. These simulations show that much as people influence structure, structure also influences the decisions of agents. Crucial to this analysis is the assumption made on the local information available to agents that informs their choices.