Del desespero de Greenspan a la esperanza de Obama: las bases científicas de la cooperación como principios de regulación

A common assumption, often accepted by regulators – that individuals act only in their narrow self-interest – is false. Evidence from both the natural and social sciences suggests that most people are strongly motivated to cooperate and help one another. Organizations (such as Toyota and Wikipedia) that cultivate and take advantage of these inclinations have prospered. Policy can be designed to incorporate attitudes toward cooperation, and to channel these tendencies in productive directions.cooperation, altruism, communication, critique of rational actor model, solidarity, situational framing, norms, trust, transparency, reputation, social dynamics

Wikileaks revisited: Is Julian Assange a straw man?

Two interesting recent publications on Wikileaks by US law professors. Alasdair Roberts says that the contribution of the Wikileaks phenomenon to transparency has been hugely over-exaggerated, and Yochai Benkler who says more or less the opposite

Everything in its Right Place: Social Cooperation and Artist Compensation

The music industry’s crisis response to the Internet has been the primary driver of U.S. copyright policy for over a decade. The core institutional response has been to increase the scope of copyright and the use of litigation, prosecution, and technical control mechanisms for its enforcement. The assumption driving these efforts has been that without heavily-enforced copyright, artists will not be able to make a living from their art. Throughout this period artists have been experimenting with approaches that do not rely on technological or legal enforcement, but on constructing web-based business models that engage fans and rely on voluntary compliance and payment mechanisms. Anecdotal reports of such efforts have occasionally surfaced in the media. Here we present the first extensive sales-data evidence, gleaned from hundreds of thousands of online voluntary transactions, from three web-based efforts over a period of several years. This Article examines the effectiveness of these voluntary models as compared to the baseline-forcing system advocated by the industry and adopted and enforced by Congress and successive U.S. administrations over the past fifteen years. Platforms for artist-fan cooperation are complex and dynamic systems, sensitive to a variety of design factors that can either increase participation and prosocial behavior or dampen participation and enable anti-social behavior. In addition to providing substantial evidence for copyright policy, our study reports field observations of the design characteristics that support cooperation. A growing literature experimentally and theoretically explores prosocial behavior that significantly and systematically refutes the self-interest hypothesis characterizing most rational actor modeling. This literature has not yet been translated into a design approach aimed specifically at designing systems of cooperation. Building on experimental and theoretical literature in diverse fields of behavioral sciences, we synthesize a series of design levers that should improve the degree to which individuals cooperate. We then specify how these design levers might be translated into specific user interface features, describe the ways in which these design levers have been utilized in the sites under study, and present hypotheses about additional features that could improve cooperative outcomes. The Article contributes to the Internet copyright policy debates by offering empirical evidence showing that well-designed voluntary cooperation models compare favorably to more aggressive and widely criticized enforcement policies based on copyright law and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It provides an empirical foundation for challenging the guiding assumptions of those policies

Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm

The paper explains why open source software is an instance of a potentially broader phenomenon. Specifically, I suggest that nonproprietary peer-production of information and cultural materials will likely be a ubiquitous phenomenon in a pervasively networked society. I describe a number of such enterprises, at various stages of the information production value chain. These enterprises suggest that incentives to engage in nonproprietary peer production are trivial as long as enough contributors can be organized to contribute. This implies that the limit on the reach of peer production efforts is the modularity, granularity, and cost of integration of a good produced, not its total cost. I also suggest reasons to think that peer-production can have systematic advantages over both property-based markets and corporate managerial hierarchies as a method of organizing information and cultural production in a networked environment, because it is a better mechanism for clearing information about human capital available to work on existing information inputs to produce new outputs, and because it permits largers sets of agents to use larger sets of resources where there are increasing returns to the scale of both the set of agents and the set of resources available for work on projects. As capital costs and communications costs decrease in importance as factors of information production, the relative advantage of peer production in clearing human capital becomes more salient.Comment: 29th TPRC Conference, 200