Conclusion

As Nico Stehr, in this volume, describes so well, knowledge, for the economist, has a strange characteristic: sharing or circulating it does not reduce the portion everyone has of it but rather allows for multiplying ad infinitum the number of people who hold this knowledge. The economist expresses this strange characteristic by qualifying knowledge as being non-rival, meaning that users of knowledge are not rivals. In other words, the use of knowledge by an additional agent does not require producing an additional copy. The marginal cost of using existing knowledge is almost nil (especially in light of the new information and communication technologies). Therefore, the sharing and circulation of knowledge are actions that make no one poorer, but on the contrary enrich the communities in which they occur.