Big data and big techs: understanding the value of information in platform capitalism
- PDF / 532,361 Bytes
- 14 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 99 Downloads / 190 Views
Big data and big techs: understanding the value of information in platform capitalism Alain Marciano1 · Antonio Nicita2 · Giovanni Battista Ramello3 Accepted: 4 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract One of the major challenges that result from the digital transformation occurring in our societies bears on its impact on the organization and regulation of the economy. This leads to a dramatic change to the economic institutions of capitalism—into what could be defined as platform capitalism—that rests on a fundamental dilemma between ‘decentralization’ on the one side and ‘concentration’ on the other. This is the main puzzle that the emergence of a big data driven economy is actually offering to law and economics scholars and to policy makers. This paper introduces to some of the major aspects of this dilemma. Keywords Big data · Platform capitalism · Regulation · Decentralization · Concentration
1 Introduction The digital revolution our societies are facing generates important challenges both at the level of the law and economics theory of institutions and at level of policy design. Big Data obviously transform the economic institutions of capitalism as we knew it into a sort of digital capitalism, changing the way in which information is produced and exchanged in the market. In a data driven economy, access to relevant information is dramatically decreased and so the dimension of transaction costs traditionally arising under various forms of asymmetric information, known as agency problems or post-contractual opportunism in incomplete contracts. Reduced transaction costs for accessing information are in turn expected to have an impact on the overall efficiency, reasonably positive, and to expand the * Giovanni Battista Ramello [email protected] 1
University of Montpellier and MRE, Montpellier, France
2
Lumsa University, Roma, Italy
3
Università del Piemonte Orientale, Alessandria, Italy
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
European Journal of Law and Economics
aggregate dimension of market transactions relative to hierarchical transactions within institutions alternative to the market (such us vertically integrated firms, according to Coase’s (1981) and Williamson’s lesson on the role of the dimension of transactions costs in affecting decisions on “make versus buy”). On the other hand, reduced transaction costs on gathering relevant information in the market (and on monitoring economic transactions and behaviors) also affect contracting costs over the bundle of uses embedded in private property rights. Many algorithmic solutions to rent a car or a house show as it has become easier and cheaper to coordinate actions and bargaining over access to each use included in the bundle of rights in a way that minimizes rival uses. One feature of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ precisely entails such characteristic of property rights divisibility for the uses bundled in a property right (Demsetz 1967): once non-separable, several uses bundled in a property right may now be allocated by data driven algorithmi
Data Loading...
