Hoarding and Sharing

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For the large outdoor signboard known as a hoarding, see Billboard (advertising). For other meanings, see Hoarding (disambiguation).

Hoarding is the storing of food or other goods. Hoarding of food is a natural behaviour in certain species of animals. It occurs in two forms:

• Larder hoarding, the collection of large amounts of food in a single place (a larder), which usually also serves as the nest where the animal lives. Hamsters are famous larder hoarders. Indeed, some languages have a verb which is derived from hamster that means "to hoard" (e.g. German hamstern, Dutch hamsteren, and Swedish hamstra, or in non-germanic languages, Polish chomikować, from chomik – hamster. In Hebrew it goes the other way around - hamster; oger (אוגר) comes from to hoarde; le'egor (לאגור)).
• Scatter hoarding, the formation of a large number of small hoards or caches. Many species of squirrel, including the Eastern Gray Squirrel and the fox squirrel are well known for scatter hoarding.

While humans are not notable for hoarding behavior, it is a common response to fear, whether fear of imminent society-wide danger or simple fear of a shortage of some good. When trouble looms (such as civil unrest or natural disaster), people's first instinct is to collect foodstuffs, water, gasoline and other essentials which they believe, rightly or wrongly, will soon be in short supply. (They also hoard money, especially if they expect deflation, in which falling prices mean that the purchasing power of money will rise.) This behaviour can often cause the very shortage which has been feared, and governments sometimes choose to introduce rationing in order to combat hoarding, as well as to reduce consumption and waste. However, those who have successfully hoarded the desired goods will not have to worry about the shortage, whether it was their fault or not. The compulsive collecting of objects is known as pathological or compulsive hoarding.

With the advent of personal computers people started hoarding digital data. In 1980s they started storing megabytes of interesting texts, images and software on floppy disks. Two decades later, computer users hoard on their hard disks gigabytes of songs, movies, software and pornography. Even though most of the content is not unique and can be easily downloaded from the Internet, many people enjoy creating large personal collections. Now, the data is slowly migrating to portable devices. For example, a 2004 UK study by Toshiba found 60% of the owners of portable devices store between 1000 and 2000 music files on them, the equivalent of 100 music CDs [1].

On a larger scale hoarding can be a business strategy similar to monopolisation, where an individual or organization attempts to temporarily control all available supplies of a given good in order to artificially increase the price. This strategy is also known as "cornering the market".

This article is based on the article "Hoarding" from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. Here you find the list of authors of this article. The article can only edited within Wikipedia. Edit this article in Wikipedia.

Sharing is the joint use of a resource. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or alternating use of an inherently finite good, such as a common pasture or a timeshared residence. In a broader sense, it can also include the free granting of use rights to a good that is capable of being treated as a nonrival good, such as information. Still more loosely, "sharing" can actually mean giving something as an outright gift: for example, to "share" ones food really means to give some of it as a gift.

Sharing figures prominently in gift economies, but also can play a significant role in market economies, for example in car sharing.

The issue of handling shared resources figures prominently in computer science: for example time-sharing is an approach to interactive computing in which a single computer is used to provide apparently simultaneous interactive general-purpose computing to multiple users by sharing processor time.

Sharing is a key feature in the developing field of free software and open source software, with implications for economics. This is leading to a need to review licensing, patents and copyright, and to controversy in these areas, as well as new approaches like creative commons and the GPL.

References

• Yochai Benkler, Sharing Nicely: On Sharable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production, Yale Law Journal, Vol. 114, 273-358 (PDF)

• Bruce Perens (2005). "The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source". Retrieved October 25, 2005.

This article is based on the article "Sharing" from Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License. Here you find the list of authors of this article. The article can only edited within Wikipedia. Edit this article in Wikipedia.