Shared Creation

From Joshua Gans’s Information Wants to be Shared.

Economic theory has not quite caught up with this interesting area of

shared information. I can speculate on future business models for books and

the news because they fall within baseline economic motives. But when

it comes to shared creation, nonmonetary motives loom larger and the

economist’s toolkit is harder to rely upon. Wikipedia is a prime example.

More than just a content platform, it is built on and maintained by an army of anonymous volunteers. Back in 2001, when it started, economists would

not have predicted Wikipedia’s success; nor can they really explain it now.

Other social scientists have not waited for economists to catch up. But

perhaps no person has examined the notion that broad, shared creation can

be effective more than MIT professor Eric von Hippel. One of the great

facts from his research is this: a vast number of useful innovations come

not from some scientist and engineer tinkering in a lab, but from users

solving their own problems. Examples abound, from scientific instruments,

to mountain bikes and, of course, to open source software. In some cases,

the innovations were the work of lone innovators, while for others, local

communities together produced advances. It is the latter that interests us

here.

Economists thought that Wikipedia couldn’t work because of problems of motivation but what turned out to matter most was not motivation but transaction costs. With 7 billion people and low transaction costs what other forms of shared creation become possible?