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Analysis of Information Options offers new tools for evaluating investments in research, mineral exploration, logistics, energy transmission, and other information operations. With Information Options, the underlying assets are information assets and the rules governing exercise are based on the realities of the information realm (infosphere). Information Options can be modeled as options to “purchase” information assets by paying the cost of the information operations involved. Information Options arise at several stages of value creation. The initial stage involves observation of physical phenomena with accompanying data capture. The next refinement is to organize the data into structured databases. Then bits of information are selected from storage and synthesized into an information product (such as a management report). Next, the information product is presented to the user via an efficient interface that does not require the user to be a field expert. Information Options are similar in concept to real options but substantially different in their details, since real options have physical objects as the underlying assets and the rules governing exercise are based on the realities of the physical world. Also, while exercising a financial option typically kills the option, Information Options may include multiple exercises. Information Options may involve high volatility or jump processes as well, further enhancing their value. This chapter extends several important real option applications into the information realm, including jump process models and models for valuing options to synthesize any of n information items into any of m output assets.

Can we broaden the boundaries of the history of economic thought to include positionalities articulated by grassroots movements? Following Keynes’s famous remark from General Theory that ‘practical men […] are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,’ we might be wont to dismiss such a push from below. While it is sometimes true that grassroots movements channel preexisting economic thought, I wish to argue that grassroots economic thought can also precede developments subsequently elaborated by economists. This paper considers such a case: by women at the intersection of the women’s liberation movement and the claimants’ unions movement in 1970s Britain. Oral historical and archival work on these working-class women and on achievements such as their succeeding to establish unconditional basic income as an official demand of the British Women’s Liberation Movement forms the springboard for my reconstruction of the grassroots feminist economic thought underpinning the women’s basic income demand. I hope to demonstrate, firstly, how this was a prefiguration of ideas later developed by feminist economists and philosophers; secondly, how unique it was for its time and a consequence of the intersectionality of class, gender, race, and dis/ability. Thirdly, I should like to suggest that bringing into the fold this particular grassroots feminist economic thought on basic income would widen the mainstream understanding and historiography of the idea of basic income. Lastly, I hope to make the point that, within the history of economic thought, grassroots economic thought ought to be heeded far more than it currently is.