For profitable ventures, the reciprocal commitment way of doing things would be to build a coop by getting everyone to commit to paying in large amounts of their own money to keep the lights on for the first 6 months, iff enough contributing members are found.
The current alternative is getting an investor. Investors, as a mechanism for shifting equilibria, has a lot of filters that make unviable ideas less likely to recieve funding (the investor has an interest in making good bets, and experience in it) and insulate the workers from risk (if the venture fails, it’s the investor who eats the cost, not the workers).
It’s conceivable that having reciprocal commitment technologies would open the way for lots of hardship as fools wager a lot of their own money on projects that never could have succeeded. It’s conceivable that the reason the investor system isn’t creating the change we want to see is that those changes aren’t really viable yet under any system and “enabling” them would just result in a lot of pain. (I hope this isn’t generally true, but in some domains it probably is.)
What great difference do you imagine there being between “kickstarter for inadequate equilibria” and “kickstarter”
It’s applicable to kickstarter, but kickstarter tends to be used for such small projects that it’s rare than any real damage will be done. It wont be until you have a serious enough system that people stake house-sized sums of money on the project’s success that the real trouble starts.
The idea here is to coordinate action, not so much raising money (though it is technically possible to use it for that). I’d say It’s more similar to CollAction than to kickstarter
For profitable ventures, the reciprocal commitment way of doing things would be to build a coop by getting everyone to commit to paying in large amounts of their own money to keep the lights on for the first 6 months, iff enough contributing members are found.
The current alternative is getting an investor. Investors, as a mechanism for shifting equilibria, has a lot of filters that make unviable ideas less likely to recieve funding (the investor has an interest in making good bets, and experience in it) and insulate the workers from risk (if the venture fails, it’s the investor who eats the cost, not the workers).
It’s conceivable that having reciprocal commitment technologies would open the way for lots of hardship as fools wager a lot of their own money on projects that never could have succeeded. It’s conceivable that the reason the investor system isn’t creating the change we want to see is that those changes aren’t really viable yet under any system and “enabling” them would just result in a lot of pain. (I hope this isn’t generally true, but in some domains it probably is.)
Ummm… isn’t this more applicable to KickStarter?
What great difference do you imagine there being between “kickstarter for inadequate equilibria” and “kickstarter”
It’s applicable to kickstarter, but kickstarter tends to be used for such small projects that it’s rare than any real damage will be done. It wont be until you have a serious enough system that people stake house-sized sums of money on the project’s success that the real trouble starts.
The idea here is to coordinate action, not so much raising money (though it is technically possible to use it for that). I’d say It’s more similar to CollAction than to kickstarter