At 12:41 PM 7/28/96, Ian Grigg wrote:
Hi Tim,
you said:
The _costs_ of extending beyond the Schelling point boundaries is deemed to be too high, and the boundary persists.
This reminds me of the transactional theory of business units. Working from memory, the optimal size of a business unit is positively related to the cost of the transactions conducted between units, other things being held constant.
Thus, in a place where it is "expensive to do business" the dominant form of company will be large. Conversely in a cheap business environment, small companies will predominate. This notion spurs one to examine the transactional costs and to decide (or not) to lower them...
Yes, I think these things are deeply intertwined. Coase's work on the nature of corporations, for example. (Another connection is that economics and markets are largely about "signalling mechanisms," and it can be argued that prices are variants of Schelling points, albeit hopping around as other market players jockey for advantage.)
The interesting part for your family context is that falling transaction costs have purportedly produced a shift away from large companies to smaller units. Those falling costs are in the sphere of digital communications, other technology, and regulation. If such were to apply to the context of families, upbringing children and education in general, one might predict that the size of the family should shrink.
Which it has, as you note. The availability of microwave dinners, transportation to new jobs, new employment patterns, and other factors too numerable to mention are correlated fairly strongly with a reduction in the size of the average family.
One would then be lead to ask, if you are proposing that Internet technologies in general and crypto in particular are influences on the Schelling points related to the family rights set, can this result in smaller family units?
I wouldn't go quite _this_ far! (And it's hard to go too much further than we have already...as you noted, increasing numbers of Westerners are single.) Certainly your comments are generally relevant and interesting, and sociologists should have fun examining the economic, game-theoretic, psychological, and other factors that are interlinked. --Tim May Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software! We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Licensed Ontologist | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."