I think you misunderstood my second point. Although there is a cost to complexity for ever dominant assurant contract, I was talking about the cost for each individual contract to get people to know about it.
Re point #1, isn’t this just moving the cost of failure from the individual to the person sponsoring the contract? It feels like a similar issue.
Edit: Actually, it seems like game theoretically point #1 does seem a bit different with this setup. I’ll have to think about it some more.
But that doesn’t seem like a big cost to me. It seems that other methods of solving coordination problems have similarly high or even higher costs—e.g. campaign to raise awareness to get people to vote for legislation to solve the problem… Think of how many petitions there are on Change.org and how many signatures they regularly get. Now imagine that you got paid $1 on average for each one that you signed. People would be making shittons of money just by logging into change.org and browsing through proposals. Until, that is, a large portion of the population starts regularly doing this… then the money flow shrinks but change starts happening!
Yes it’s moving the cost of failure to the person sponsoring the contract, but I think for many of these problems there should be people with enough money and altruism willing to take the risk. E.g. political campaigns regularly spend comparable sums. And like you perhaps hint at with the game theory point, it’s different when the risk is all on one person—because it means we can be much more confident that the contract will trigger, conditional on someone taking the risk to fund it, and thus the risk is actually much smaller.
I think you misunderstood my second point. Although there is a cost to complexity for ever dominant assurant contract, I was talking about the cost for each individual contract to get people to know about it.
Re point #1, isn’t this just moving the cost of failure from the individual to the person sponsoring the contract? It feels like a similar issue.
Edit: Actually, it seems like game theoretically point #1 does seem a bit different with this setup. I’ll have to think about it some more.
But that doesn’t seem like a big cost to me. It seems that other methods of solving coordination problems have similarly high or even higher costs—e.g. campaign to raise awareness to get people to vote for legislation to solve the problem… Think of how many petitions there are on Change.org and how many signatures they regularly get. Now imagine that you got paid $1 on average for each one that you signed. People would be making shittons of money just by logging into change.org and browsing through proposals. Until, that is, a large portion of the population starts regularly doing this… then the money flow shrinks but change starts happening!
Yes it’s moving the cost of failure to the person sponsoring the contract, but I think for many of these problems there should be people with enough money and altruism willing to take the risk. E.g. political campaigns regularly spend comparable sums. And like you perhaps hint at with the game theory point, it’s different when the risk is all on one person—because it means we can be much more confident that the contract will trigger, conditional on someone taking the risk to fund it, and thus the risk is actually much smaller.