Pay to Play in Information Markets

Sampo Syreeni decoy at iki.fi
Mon Nov 19 15:43:31 PST 2001


On Mon, 19 Nov 2001, Nomen Nescio wrote:

>Of course the easy answer is that the market will decide. But when
>you're trying to design the mechanisms then you have to anticipate the
>market's needs. You have to predict what the market will decide.

I.e. you have to predict what the people want. Sane engineering, wouldn't
you say?

>Unfortunately, the realistic answer seems to be that many possible
>patterns of payment will be desired by the market. In some cases
>providers of data will pay others to read it: advertising, political or
>persuasive arguments, reputation-building essays.  In other cases people
>who want the data will pay those who provide it: music and other arts,
>entertaining and informative works.

After which the one who gets the proportions right wins the game. The
others follow suit as soon as they can predict/acknowledge that their
prediction wasn't as accurate as it could have been. It's called
competition. Where's the problem?

You seem to be forgetting the costs of setting up the service in the first
place. If you factor those in, the producers certainly should be on the
receiving end.

OTOH, prices should be dynamic (derived from what is actually happening
inside the system), and should always permit negative values as well, to
account for unexpected flows of income. I think this is what you're after,
basically. One shouldn't determine beforehand who pays who, even if the
rates themselves are floating.

>Ideally the publisher should be able to pay the author for the work.

This is true, also. Price discovery is something not easily implemented
algorithmically. Perhaps MN should bill the services differentially based
on demand and blocks reserved? If there was a more lucrative author to be
served, the author whose blocks are currently being stored would have to
pay?

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2





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