Theory of agricultural information, 2: About the amount of information.
1991
Matsuda T.
In this paper we modified the foregoing classification represented in the previous paper. We newly divided the information IV (Consuming-information) into two; the information IV (Differentiate-information) and the information V (Consuming-information). As for economics in general, we at first have to define the so-called amount of information, but it has been said that it is by no means easy to grasp the amount of information in light of the current development of information science up until today. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concepts relating to the information science to make the amount of information clear. In order to do so, firstly, we would like to try to decipher the way of application of the concept, i.e., "content of information", which is used in the information theory. We, however, reached to the conclusion that this concept is inappropriate to express the amount of information in economics. Since, in economic studies, we mainly analyze either human behavior, changes of behavior or changes of utility under the condition that the actor has got specific information. In this respect, the concept of the amount that is separated from the meaning of information is not useful to us here. Secondly, we interpreted the concept of "entropy" that is regarded as being the unit of uncertainty. In conclusion, we have to say that "entropy" is not the sufficient expression for the amount of information. As to the "Differentiate-information", what we can at least clarify in this paper is that to set up a unit of the differentiation is difficult. From the considerations mentioned above, we reached to such a conclusion that it might be difficult to set up the general unit that can express the amount of information. Moreover, we need to accumulate analyses, having supposed an appropriate unit to each analysis and defined the information according to the purpose of our analysis.
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