Building consensus online
From:
Miles Fidelman
Date:
Feb 02 00:16 UTC
Short link
I've been thinking a bit more about this whole issue, and a couple of
thoughts came to mind while driving and listening to PBS.
Markets are a form of group decision making - particularly capital
markets, and more particularly capital markets where very large players
are butting heads.
In essence, when companies, or mutual funds are moving large dollars
around, they're placing bets on the future - for example moving money
from investments in oil to investments in wind or solar technology (as,
for example GE is doing a lot these days). Unlike votes, there's real
money involved, and if you bet right you win big, if you bet wrong, you
lose big - which sort of makes people think before casing their "votes."
In some cases, we have different players betting competitively - making
investments in different approaches to a problem. Down the road, maybe
one approach works, the other doesn't, or both don't, or maybe both do.
Or think of auction markets - such as the recent auction of C Block
spectrum. Somebody wins, and gets make money with the resource; but the
loser gets to keep their money and take it somewhere else. Of
sometimes, as in the spectrum auction, somebody (Google in particular)
bid the price up so high that a set of rules have been activated that
requires whomever ultimately wins to make the resulting network open to
all comers - which is a win even to some of the losers.
One can also envision an auction market - say involving a situation
where there can be only one winner - where the loser's money ultimately
gets combined with the winner's (3 carriers bid for spectrum, the losers
end up with their cash turned into stock in the winner). A choice has
been made, and now everybody is in the same boat.
Maybe there's something in there as a mechanism for societal-scale
decision making - as long as little players have a way to aggregate
their cash to level the playing field with big players. Somehow,
conflating dollars and votes, making it important to actually think
about decisions, and providing a return on making good decisions is a
start towards something.
Miles
p.s. You might wonder what I was listening to on PBS to spark such
thoughts. Why Marketplace, of course. :-)