Social and economic policy largely works through the use of various incentives and disincentives designed to affect values in covered markets. A proper understanding of the full range of values can be critical: from a political economics perspective, determining how values are framed as central or peripheral can reflect which groups are privileged; further, the effectiveness of policy can depend on correctly identifying and measuring all values at play in a market, including those considered externalities.

This paper discusses the importance of a thorough consideration of value in media and information economic policy, and describes an approach that is appropriate to such a consideration. The social economics approach extends consideration by focusing on the critical role of broad social values and of non-financial (or nonmarket) sources of individual values that arise with information goods and services such as media content.