What You Want Depends on What You Know: Firm Preferences in an Information Age

Abstract

Information has become a core input for many companies. This article examines how this affects firm policy preferences. In contrast to national typologies of capitalism or microeconomic expectations, it uses information economics and historical institutionalism to construct a deductive model positing two basic logics. Firms with significant information assets view data as a private good, supporting policies that constrain information access and distribution. Companies with few information assets face a network effects economy and thus call for policies that promote a liberal data environment. The information asset argument is examined in the context of initial data privacy legislation passed in the United States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom in the 1970s and early 1980s. The finding of the article contributes to literature interested in the political economy of services-based economies, underscores the significance of sociohistorical processes for preference formation, and calls attention to the boundary conditions of historically derived causal propositions.