Platforms for sharing resources and cooperative innovation

1. Platforms for sharing resources and cooperative innovation __________________________________________________________________________________________ Communications FuturesViral CommunicationsMIT November 20, 2004 Yochai Benkler Yale University yochai.benkler@yale.edu

2. Overview __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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

3. Sharing resources __________________________________________________________________________________________ • Communications capacity • Open wireless networks/viral communications • Skype? • Distributed Storage • p2p file sharing • Freenet; Oceanstore • Distributed computation • @Home projects

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

5. Feasibility conditions forsocial sharing of shareable goods __________________________________________________________________________________________ • Shareable goods • Lumpy • Come in discrete packages of functionality-producing 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.

6. Feasibility conditions forsocial sharing of shareable goods __________________________________________________________________________________________ • Shareable goods • Lumpy • Mid-grained • => 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

7. Feasibility conditions forsocial sharing of shareable goods __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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

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

9. Feasibility conditions forsocial sharing of shareable goods __________________________________________________________________________________________ • These are feasibility conditions • Do not mean sharing or peer production are “better” in any normatively relevant sense • Do not force sharing—there 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

10. Opportunities __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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” application—hence flexible in definition of welfare sought • Survivable, robust

11. Challenges __________________________________________________________________________________________ • Motivation • Coordination • Cooperation

12. Diverse Motivations __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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

13. Diverse Motivations __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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

14. Diverse Motivations __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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

15. Diverse Motivations __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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

16. Four transactional frameworks __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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?

17. Levers used in commons __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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)

18. Coordination & cooperation __________________________________________________________________________________________

19. Questions __________________________________________________________________________________________ • 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