[p2p-research] Fwd: [Arch-econ] The Ostrom and Williamson Nobel prizes and broadband development

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jaap van Till <vantill at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 2:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Arch-econ] The Ostrom and Williamson Nobel prizes and
broadband development
To: Economics of IP Networks <arch-econ at cookreport.com>
Cc: carlota perez <carperezperez at yahoo.com>, Michel Bauwens <
michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


Dear friends,

Congratulations! It looks as if this year our field has not been awarded one
Nobel Prize (Kao, the father of optic fiber communication, a long wait since
Marconi for wireless telegraphy) but two.
Elinor Ostrom gets 1/2 the Prize for Economics for her explanation of the
third structure besides government and market: The Commons. The third pole
in the Trias Telematica I described before in this list. Yes in Stockholm
and elsewhere they are starting to get it what we as engineers are doing.

Why does it concern our field? The Internet itself with its egineering
method and peer governance is the prime example of what mrs. Ostrom has
described as a commons! It is far from a tragedy because the right things
are shared and other things are chosen deliberatly to be competitive=
non-shared. So are Google, Youtube and Wikipedia. Cooperatives with shared
infrastructures like for instance the Open Source SW devel. movement,
SURFnet, the AMS-IX, Wi-Fi and city FttH projects. Mrs. Ostrom has described
the NL "waterschappen" and flowerauctions as examples. I would add the "Sea
of Green" in Iran coordinated through internet and Twitter as an example. I
would like to call them:

    ****Cases of "The Triumph of the P2P Networked Commons"*****

These case have a number of things in common when succesfull (not always).
First of all the participants (often creative class volunteers) contribute
more than is taken out. That is why Internet and Google etc grow and grow.
Right Vint ? Unstoppable P2P communities on networks and often without even
a governing hierarchy needed. To quote Hendrik below:

Enabling local bottom-up efforts to develop new institutional arrangements
for creating and supervising new infrastructures tend to be a more lasting
road.
This is the start of something big, as forcasted by Michel Bauwens and
Carlota Perez.

Jaap van Till



On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Hendrik Rood <Hendrik.Rood at stratix.nl>wrote:

>  For those of you who didn't follow the news this Monday, the decision to
> award the Nobel prize to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson is a very
> interesting one from the perspective of developing new broadband
> infrastructures.
>
> I have read many books and articles frrom both scholars work for my own
> travails in Infrastructure Economics.
>
> Recommendable are:
>
> 1. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons
> 2. Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism
>
> In Ostrom's work one of the key and repeated findings is that it is
> possible to avoid the Tragedy of the Commons, but the successful examples
> she did find rely on local, voluntary arrangements where the stakeholders
> dealt with eachother and not centralised top-down attempts. Ostrom
> contributes that (forelast section of her book) to common misconceptions
> among social scientists providing policy advice:
>
> "The models that social scientists tend to use for analyzing Common Pool
> Resources problems have the perverse effect of supporting increased
> centralization of political authority. First, the individuals using CPRs are
> viewed as if they are capable of short-term maximization, but not of
> long-term reflection about joint strategies to improve joint outcomes.
> Second, these individuals are viewed as if they are in a trap and cannot get
> out without some external authority imposing a solution. Third, the
> institutions that individuals may have established are ignored or rejected
> as inefficient, without examining how these institutions may help them
> acquire information, reduce monitoring and enforcement costs, and equitable
> allocate appropriation rights and provision duties. Fourth, the solutions
> presented for "the" government to impose are themselves based on models of
> idealized markets or idealized states."
>
> Oliver Williamson's work is a bit more abstract as he develops his
> Transaction Cost Economics approach. In the book I recommend, he includes in
> Chapter 13. Franchise Bidding for Natural Monopoly an appendix: The Oakland
> CATV Franchise Bidding Experience. His framework and that kind of case
> neatly explains what he calls the "Fundamental Transformation" of awarding
> the tender as after awarding incentives and behaviour of the winner tend to
> change considerably.
>
> I think I has mentioned this work before on this mailing lists.
>
> In general, the way the Internet has developed in the last few decades and
> created its own governance institutions provides tremendous amounts of
> material that underline earlier findings by Ostrom.
>
> Williamson's work gives good insights on the importance of the *ex-post*institutions of contract. Many people who recommend policies have the habit
> to focus on *ex-ante* designs of regulations or incentive alignments and
> make the mistake that mainly private ex-post contract implementation
> and monitoring contract adherence tends to be far more relevant for the
> final outcomes.
>
> With that respect there is a good reason to be quite watchful on what is
> effectively done under the current bold "programs" launched by various
> governments, running on tax-payer money. Enabling local bottom-up efforts to
> develop new institutional arrangements for creating and supervising new
> infrastructures tend to be a more lasting road.
>
> With kind regards,
>
> Hendrik Rood
> --
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Arch-econ at cookreport.com
> http://nine.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/arch-econ
>
>



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