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Yoram Barzel and Harold Demsetz pointed out that some economists want to stigmatise information costs. Armen Alchian was in this camp too.
Demsetz asked why the costs of finding, digging up and processing an ore deposit is a legitimate cost, but the costs of finding and interpreting information are illegitimate costs. There is an arbitrary classification of costs going on here according to Demsetz:
…there exists an efficient amount of ignorance in an economic system if the cost of acquiring information is positive.
The amount of ignorance that is efficient increases as does the cost of transacting (viewed as the cost of conveying information). Ignorance not only may be bliss, it also may be efficient.
One cannot claim that resources are wrongly allocated simply because information is not possessed or negotiation is absent; nor can one claim that resources are misplaced because a specific market does not exist.
None of these is free, and the costs of acquiring information and creating and maintaining markets may be so high as to make it efficient to forego some information and some markets.
A decision that something is not worth taking into account is not, because of this, a source of inefficiency. That this something is not taken into account is a reckoning if it follows from a thoughtful anticipation that it is not worth taking into account. An explicit accounting for every ‘something’ would be inefficient indeed in a world in which knowledge is not free

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