This is the unspoken foundation of the "sharing economy". You get a big pool of individual actors to make exchanges with each other in a marketplace like the ones provided by Uber, TaskRabbit, etc.
The market takes its little cut of every transaction, but takes zero percent of the risk. That's all passed on to the individual participants.
Car break down? Not Uber's fault. Get hit by a drunk driver? Lyft don't care. Have an allergic reaction to your latex gloves? Doesn't have anything to do with TaskRabbit as far as they're concerned.
The core of the challenge is our measuring stick --- money --- is a too-aggressively lossy transaction representation system, yet it is press-ganged into use as such when it really should only ever represent just the money itself instead of all the imputed characteristics ascribed to it by current mainstream economic thought. All sorts of desirable information by involved parties is detached from the money when the transaction completes, and we currently have very incomplete mechanisms and highly fragmented platforms for conveying that information.
Taking this down to a more concrete level, if every transaction and popular properties in a market were recorded and undoxx-ably published blockchain-style, then market actors who try to externalize costs will find those properties they are externalizing upon others added to the system, and their activity shunned more quickly. Much rent-seeking and externalizing behavior today in businesses (especially gig economy-pitch-based businesses) relies upon a great deal of extreme asymmetric information postures between the parties, possible because of the much more complex information ecosystem we operate in as economic actors today.
Trading is an information war where the only edge you can get is through asymmetric information about the deals and the products/services (violence being a special case). I wonder what trade would look like with a complete transparent process.
a good analysis. Would be great to take a look at how much of the cost saving is actually reduced interaction with externalities that are now costed out or left to the final-service-provider instead of the "platform.
