Collateral public good (was Re: [extropy-chat] Noisy future day etc..)

[Hal Finney]

Hal Finney wrote:
> It is no wonder that such markets are under-provided in our society.

Brett Paatsch replied:
> Cynicism Hal?

No, just economics!  It is a well known result that public goods are under
provided in a free market.  Information markets are (impure) public goods.
There are positive externalities in operating such a market, and there
is no mechanism to capture the benefits which other people derive and
use them to fund the market.

It might be possible to try to keep the results secret and available
only to subscribers, but the amount of information is so slight, just the
current price for each commodity, that it would be difficult to enforce
an embargo on the data.  Plus the barriers to entry are pretty low (at
least initially) so one could expect competition to quickly arise if the
market's operations became profitable.  On the other hand there might
be network effects; a well established market would have high liquidity
that a newcomer would be hard pressed to match, like eBay does.

Hal