Sharing Economy

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

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About the author

Michael Munger is a researcher and administrator at Duke University in North Carolina. He is a senior research fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, California, and at the American Institute for Economic Research at Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He has taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Texas, and the University of North Carolina. His published research has covered spatial theory, political decision-making and the problem of voluntary exchange. His most recent book, Is Capitalism Sustainable?, was published in 2019 by the American Institute for Economic Research. He is a past editor of the journal Public Choice, as well as a past president of the Public Choice Society. His first professional position was as a staff economist at the US Federal Trade Commission. He received his PhD in economics at Washington University in 1984.

Acknowledgements

This project was suggested by Jamie Whyte, and was reworked by Richard Wellings, both of the IEA. My thanks to them for the proposal, and to Syed Kamall, also of the IEA, for seeing things through, when there were many competing demands on his time and resources. Thanks are due to Curtis Bram for research assistance; thanks also to Jon Wainwright for converting the manuscript into something resembling workable prose. Numerous helpful suggestions and improvements were suggested by Drew Millard. All of those who deserve credit for what is done well here are blameless for what is done poorly; for that, I am solely responsible.

The ideas expressed here owe credit, but no blame, to seminar participants at the University of Colorado, Oklahoma State University, the University of Texas, and Trinity College in the US, as well as the Institute for Liberal Studies in Canada, and the ANU and Notre Dame in Australia. Finally, thanks to Donna Gingerella for tolerating my need to spend far longer than was plausible working on the details herein.

Summary

Platforms are institutions that solve the problems of delivering a good or service, of clearing payments, and of creating trust between buyer and seller.

In the past two decades, the physical locations in which transactions take place, such as the city market or shopping centre, have increasingly been replaced by online platforms. The platform revolution is an economic revolution as momentous as the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions.

The platform revolution is delivering reductions in the transaction costs of renting. New and different ways of partitioning short-term ownership have emerged. The shared feature of these markets is that they enable profitable means of commodifying excess capacity that until now could only be wasted. We pay for storage twice: wasted space, and forgone capital value.

The platform economy is making more intensive and efficient use of resources that are otherwise idle. In the long run, the consequence will be a sharp increase in the durability and average life of those resources as they are replaced.

By monetising the deadweight loss of queuing, new software platforms are capturing much of the value that would previously have been wasted by the friction of transaction costs.

Entrepreneurs can now move far beyond aspiring only to sell products or services. They can sell reductions in transaction costs alone.

Services such as Uber are software platforms which make possible transactions that otherwise could not take place. Uber is a disruptive technology which sells reductions in transaction costs, enabling a wide variety of peer-to-peer exchanges and arrangements.

The platform economy is making products and services that once did not exist, or were available only to the wealthy, available universally and practically free of charge.

Some new software platforms are being prohibited by regulators precisely because they work better and disrupt the existing systems of cronyism. Regulators who place restrictions on services such as Airbnb typically ignore the real price signal being sent by the creation of the new platforms, which is that supply is being restricted. The correct solution is to set housing free to expand residential options.

Regulators must embrace permissionless innovation, adopting a strong presumption in favour of allowing experimentation with new technologies and new business platforms.

On the other hand, regulators must avoid outdated thinking about antitrust policy as focusing on market structure. Platforms, by their nature, are giants. Any platform is by definition a monopoly within its own boundaries; in fact that is the advantage of platforms. The new regulatory framework must focus on limiting the power of platforms, especially their political power, rather than forcing inefficiency and waste by restricting their size.

Introduction

This book addresses some recent changes in a variety of markets and business activities. The core argument is that more and more markets are ‘two-sided’, with consumers and sellers both actively seeking ways to transact. A common way to characterise two-sided markets is ‘peer-to-peer’; the reason this is important is that two-sided markets are different from the traditional ‘price-taking behaviour’ models used in textbook economics. At the time this book is going to press, the global Covid-19 pandemic has given this transformation a new urgency.

The ‘place’ where many transactions occur was once physical, such as at a city market or a mall. But in the past two decades these physical locations have increasingly been replaced by virtual domains called ‘online platforms’.

One of the first attempts to model this phenomenon was Rochet and Tirole (2003: 990). As they put it:

Buyers of video game consoles want games to play on; game developers pick platforms that are or will be popular among gamers. Cardholders value credit or debit cards only to the extent that these are accepted by the merchants they patronize; affiliated merchants benefit from a widespread diffusion of cards among consumers. More generally, many if not most markets with network externalities are characterized by the presence of two distinct sides whose ultimate benefit stems from interacting through a common platform.

I will argue that platforms should be thought of as selling reductions in ‘transaction costs’, or the costs of organising and consummating an exchange, rental or other market action.¹ The three aspects of transaction costs that are relevant to online platforms are triangulation (finding information and other parties to transact with), transfer (the delivery of the product or service, and making the payment), and trust (the ability to rely on the terms of the agreement without resort to external enforcement).

In this setting, much of the action in exchange is ‘peer-to-peer’. Owners and potential users of durables such as cars or flats find ways to share, with the transactions looking like rentals. The value of these exchanges, taken individually, is small, and can be blocked by transaction costs. Platforms act as matchmakers, or middlemen, a role that traders have taken since their very first exchanges thousands of years ago. The difference now is that the matchmakers are selling only reductions in transaction costs and often have no direct role in buying or selling anything; they just help buyers and sellers in two-sided markets find each other and transact. This is quite different from the way that manufacturers are often conceived in academic economics (Evans and Schmalensee 2016: 2):

Traditional manufacturing businesses, for instance, buy raw materials, make stuff, and sell that stuff to customers. But matchmakers’ raw materials are the different groups of customers that they help bring together, not anything that they buy at all. And part of the stuff they sell to members of each group is access to members of the other groups. All of them operate physical or virtual places where members of these different groups get together. For this reason, they are often called multisided platforms. They’re places where all of these different groups can meet [emphasis added].

Platforms have always been with us, as a means of reducing transaction costs. But the dramatic increase in the importance of platforms in the last two decades is revolutionary.

1 One of the most general definitions of ‘transaction costs’ was given by Douglass North (1992), who described four components: measuring (by unit, by weight, or by period of time), enforcement (ensuring honesty and compliance with contractual obligations), ideology (attitudes toward the transaction), and ‘the size of the market’ (problems of scale, as well as transportation).

Revolutions and disruption

Economic revolutions do not care what we think of them. For people who believe they are the centre of the universe, or for technocrats who want to pull strings and push levers to ‘run things’, that can be very disquieting. But failing to understand that economies are organic complex systems can cause problems that make things much worse. These systems have internal dynamics that operate independently of the will of the state, or of any individual for that matter.² This book is an attempt to explain the dynamics of the complex systems called ‘platforms’ and to explain why, when platforms are working properly, we never notice problems in the first place.

We face the intersection of two great sources of turmoil for markets and society: the constant conflict over the degree of state direction of the economy, and the profoundly disruptive effect of the new ‘platform economy’. Either of these alone would make for disquieting politics; together, they have the potential for wrenching and unpredictable change. In a recent article, Littlewood (2018: 444) tried to peer at least a little way into the future:

It is not often that I quote with approval the words of Tony Benn, the erstwhile leader of the Labour left. His vision of a socialist Britain failed in his lifetime, but as he said, ‘Every generation has to fight the same battles again and again for there is no final victory and no final defeat’.

He was right: the identical argument applies to the struggle for free markets. In a democracy the battle of ideas is never over. The triumphalism following the Thatcher and Reagan years and the fall of the Berlin Wall was misplaced: it turns out that the intellectual advance of market liberalism in the 1980s was not some permanent Galileo‐like discovery changing human understanding in perpetuity. It was merely a protracted skirmish which is now being re‐enacted, not necessarily, on this occasion, to the advantage of those of us who favour free markets.

To win this clash of ideologies for a second time, free market proponents need to recalibrate the ammunition they are deploying. Simply stating that arguments about the market were addressed and resolved several decades ago will not persuade a new generation that big advances in state power are deeply undesirable.

No final victory; no final defeat. Policy reactions to the dynamism of market capitalism and democratic politics require agility in tactics and nimbleness of mind. This book considers some of the implications, problems and