One obstacle has been security. To develop any software that exchanges services for money, you need to put substantially more thought into the security risks of that software, and you probably can’t trust a large fraction of the existing base of standard software. Coauthor Mark S. Miller has devoted lots of effort to replacing existing operating systems and programming languages with secure alternatives, with very limited success.
One other explanation that I’ve wondered about involves conflicts of interest. Market interactions are valuable mainly when they generate cooperation among agents who have divergent goals. Most software development happens in environments where there’s enough cooperation that adding market forces wouldn’t provide much value via improved cooperation. I think that’s true even within large companies. I’ll guess that the benefits of the agoric approach only become interesting when large number of companies switch to using it, and there’s little reward to being the first such company.
It seems like market forces could even actively damage existing cooperation. While I’m not terribly familiar with the details, I’ve heard complaints of this happening at one university that I know of. There’s an internal market where departments need to pay for using spaces within the university building. As a result, rooms that would otherwise be used will sit empty because the benefit of paying the rent isn’t worth it.
Possibly this is still overall worth it—the system increasing the amount of spare capacity means that there are more spaces available for when a department really does need a space—but people do seem to complain about it anyway.
While I’m not terribly familiar with the details, I’ve heard complaints of this happening at one university that I know of. There’s an internal market where departments need to pay for using spaces within the university building. As a result, rooms that would otherwise be used will sit empty because the benefit of paying the rent isn’t worth it.
This is confusing. Why doesn’t the rent on the empty rooms fall until there are either no empty rooms or no buyers looking to use rooms? Any kind of auction mechanism (which is what I’d expect to see from something described as a “market”) should exhibit the behavior I’ve described.
Those concerns would have slowed adoption of agoric computing, but they seem to apply to markets in general, so they don’t seem useful in explaining why agoric computing is less popular than markets in other goods/services.
One obstacle has been security. To develop any software that exchanges services for money, you need to put substantially more thought into the security risks of that software, and you probably can’t trust a large fraction of the existing base of standard software. Coauthor Mark S. Miller has devoted lots of effort to replacing existing operating systems and programming languages with secure alternatives, with very limited success.
One other explanation that I’ve wondered about involves conflicts of interest. Market interactions are valuable mainly when they generate cooperation among agents who have divergent goals. Most software development happens in environments where there’s enough cooperation that adding market forces wouldn’t provide much value via improved cooperation. I think that’s true even within large companies. I’ll guess that the benefits of the agoric approach only become interesting when large number of companies switch to using it, and there’s little reward to being the first such company.
It seems like market forces could even actively damage existing cooperation. While I’m not terribly familiar with the details, I’ve heard complaints of this happening at one university that I know of. There’s an internal market where departments need to pay for using spaces within the university building. As a result, rooms that would otherwise be used will sit empty because the benefit of paying the rent isn’t worth it.
Possibly this is still overall worth it—the system increasing the amount of spare capacity means that there are more spaces available for when a department really does need a space—but people do seem to complain about it anyway.
This is confusing. Why doesn’t the rent on the empty rooms fall until there are either no empty rooms or no buyers looking to use rooms? Any kind of auction mechanism (which is what I’d expect to see from something described as a “market”) should exhibit the behavior I’ve described.
Those concerns would have slowed adoption of agoric computing, but they seem to apply to markets in general, so they don’t seem useful in explaining why agoric computing is less popular than markets in other goods/services.