The Economics and Bioeconomics of Classification: Introduction

Abstract

Four out of five papers comprising this special issue of the Journal of Bioeconomics, ‘The Economics and Bioeconomics of Classification’ are solicited papers, while Boisot & Li’s paper is an independent submission to the Journal. The papers are innovative contributions along several frontiers of economics and bioeconomics. Although biologists have long developed a sophisticated approach to classification called ‘systematics’ which deals with biological diversity in general, there is no corresponding ‘Economics of Classification’ or ‘Economic Systematics’ developed by economists even though such a field lies within the domain of the economics of information. We hope that this will change with the contributions from this collection of papers in which classification, a cognitive activity, is introduced into economics, and in turn, the ‘Economics of Classification’ integrates systematics thereby extending bioeconomics to its newest frontier, the ‘Bioeconomics of Classification’. Ghiselin & Landa’s paper, ‘The Economics and Bioeconomics of Folk and Scientific Classification’ is an example of the results of collaboration between a biologist (Ghiselin 1997) who contributes to systematics and an economist (Landa 1981, 1994), who contributes to the new field of the ‘Economics of Identity’ by introducing identity and its related concept of classification into economics in the context of a theory of the ‘ethnically homogeneous middleman group’. This collaboration created a synthesis between the economics and biology of classification. Ghiselin & Landa discuss the fundamental cognitive activity of classification as providing a summarizing, labeling and a predictive device for the efficient processing and transmission of information and knowledge to other persons. They make the important distinction between classification and identification: ‘We might think of identification as sticking items into pigeon holes, and classification proper as making the pigeon holes in which to stick them’ (p. 223). Classification is practiced by all living creatures—from the simplest one celled organisms to the most complex humans. The simplest one-celled organisms have the capacity to classify