Platforms for sharing resources and cooperative innovation

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Platforms for sharing resources and cooperative
innovation
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Communications FuturesViral CommunicationsMIT
November 20, 2004

• Yochai Benkler
• Yale University yochai.benkler_at_yale.edu

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Overview
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• Peer-based sharing as a new model of provisioning
  communications computation capacity
• Motivated and organized using social relations,
  rather than prices or firms
• Shareable goods
• Present common challenges and classes of
  solutions to cooperation problems
• Law technology social norms redundancy price

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Sharing resources
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• Communications capacity
• Open wireless networks/viral communications
• Skype?
• Distributed Storage
• p2p file sharing
• Freenet Oceanstore
• Distributed computation
• _at_Home projects

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Sharing platforms for information production
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• Free software
• Wikipedia
• Mars clickworkers
• Slashdot
• Second Life and MMOGs
• Listservs
• Peer production shares excess creative capacity
  through non-price social mechanisms

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Feasibility conditions forsocial sharing of
shareable goods
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• Shareable goods
• Lumpy
• Come in discrete packages of functionality-produci
  ng resources/goods, that do not align perfectly
  with demand for the functionality flow
• Mid-grained
• Packages can be provisioned to a substantial
  segment of a population, given wealth, cost, and
  demand for functionality flow over the lifetime
  of the good.

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Feasibility conditions forsocial sharing of
shareable goods
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• Shareable goods
• Lumpy
• Mid-grained
• gt Large amounts of excess physical capital
  capacity, widely distributed in a population in
  small chunks
• Enabling greater play for diverse human
  motivations
• Available for clearance through markets, firms,
  states, or social sharing systems

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Feasibility conditions forsocial sharing of
shareable goods
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• Shareable goods
• Human creative labor
• Highly variable
• across human beings
• within every individual over time in short and
  long term cycles
• Personal, specific, non-fungible
• intrinsically available to individuals
• weakly available for fully specified transfer

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Feasibility conditions forsocial sharing of
shareable goods
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• Shareable goods
• Human creative labor
• Modularization of information production tasks
• Modular
• Variable granularity
• Available everywhere all the time for
  self-selection by participants

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Feasibility conditions forsocial sharing of
shareable goods
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• These are feasibility conditions
• Do not mean sharing or peer production are
  better in any normatively relevant sense
• Do not force sharingthere can be market
  clearance of the same goods or creation
• Define space where social sharing and exchange
  can feasibly play a relatively large role in
  information production and provisioning of
  communication and computation

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Opportunities
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• Flexible and open to innovation
• No permission to innovate bottleneck
• Low marginal transaction costs
• Dynamically updated information about
  availability of resources for the network
• late-binding applicationhence flexible in
  definition of welfare sought
• Survivable, robust

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Challenges
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• Motivation
• Coordination
• Cooperation

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Diverse Motivations
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• Motivation crowding out theory
• Titmuss-Arrow debate over blood donation
• Different people differ in incentives
• But does money crowd-out giving?
• Frey social psychology focuses on intrinsic
  extrinsic motivations
• Benabou Tirole

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Diverse Motivations
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• Motivation crowding out theory
• Titmuss-Arrow, Frey, Benabou Tirole
• Empirics
• Frey Jege 2001 survey
• Bewley 1995 survey of managers regarding
  efficacy of incentive contracts
• Osterloh Frey 2000 knowledge transfer within
  the firm
• Frey Oberholzer Gee 1997 Kunreuther
  Easterling 1990 NIMBY increases when offered
• Gneezy Rustichini fines increase tardiness of
  kindergarten pickup

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Diverse Motivations
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• Motivation crowding out theory
• Social exchange social capital
• Carpooling, p2p file sharing, includes an
  instrumental component not accounted for on the
  psychology-based theories
• Anthropology of gift literature includes heavy
  emphasis on reciprocity, social hierarchy
• Social capital (Coleman Granovetter Porat Lin)
  focuses on instrumentalism
• Empirics Fehr Gechter 2002 reciprocity
  crowded out by money

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Diverse Motivations
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• Motivation crowding out theory
• Social exchange social capital
• Combined
• Human beings are diversely motivated
• A reward function includes
• Material motivations expressed in money pr
  punishment
• Social-psychological motivations
• Which can be instrumental or non-instrumental
• The different motivators have a complex
  relationship to each other
• Dinner with friends sex

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Four transactional frameworks
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• Price-system
• where motivation context is resistant to sharing
  claims (e.g., bank records back-up)

• Social sharing
• and exchange
• particularly valuable where lots of small
  contributions required
• particularly easy where instrumental exchange
  possible
• Viral networks
• distributed storage
• processing load balancing harder

• Firm hierarchy
• usable where excess capacity is internally
  available

• Govt Regulation
• regulatory gain
• Residual?

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Levers used in commons
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• Formal rules
• GPL cc standards
• Technological hard constraints
• Slash moderation (maximum moderations per period)
• Wireless standards (say, collision avoidance)
• Technological affordances
• Wiki transparency revert
• Moderation on Slash
• Collaborative filtering
• Reputation systems (troll filters eBay)
• Social norms (Wikipedia on objectivity)
• Redundancy (Clickworkers BitTorrent)

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Coordination cooperation
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Trans-actional frameworks/ Levers of constraint affordance social sharing exchange firms price system Govt parallel existence
contracts None or vague per transaction Longer term emp. supply 10 widgets for 1 Regulation consumer protection -
Norms Social norms firm culture Merchants - US wants YOU? -
technology social software Enterprise platforms Efficient payment systems CALEA CARNIVORE DRM purely technical coexistence
law GPL cc? Corp securities etc. Property contract NOT per transaction baseline modality -
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Questions
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• To what extent can cooperation be optimized
  purely through technological coexistence?
• How can we use other elements to improve
  cooperation?
• Transactional frameworks
• Levers of relational structuring
• As a general question?
• Learning for and from all sharing of shareable
  goods and collaborative creativity platforms
• As an applied design question