Protocolized Economics

PaperSteve PowersDecember 13, 2023

This paper argues that protocols are fundamental to economic coordination and productivity, and that economics should explicitly theorize protocols as primary constructs rather than treating them implicitly through agent preferences and technologies. Powers proposes a protocols-based view of firms as systems that reduce collaboration risks through codified behavioral agreements, positioning legal and contractual frameworks as protocol systems that enable cooperation.

Topics

economics protocols research theory

Related resources

Paper

Unprotocolized Knowledge (Revised)

This paper examines how knowledge can exist and accumulate outside of formal protocols and institutional structures, arguing that unprotocolized forms of knowledge generation—from amateur scientific dialogues to open-access communities—can rival institutional science in generating attention and insights. The authors use the 2021 arXiv paper 'The Autodidactic Universe' as a case study to explore how decentralized knowledge-sharing networks challenge traditional gatekeeping in academic discourse.

Kara Kittel, Toby Shorin

Paper

Capital Enclosure for Software Commons

Van Epps argues that entities extracting profits from software commons like Linux and Ethereum have the greatest incentive and capacity to co-opt them, analyzing how common-pool resources operate according to internal logics distinct from capital accumulation. The paper examines the structural tension between the anti-rival nature of digital goods and the enclosure mechanisms through which commercial actors capture value from collaborative software ecosystems.

Trent Van Epps

Handout

Protocol Selection Pressures

Stinson-Schroff identifies six distinct selection pressures that determine which protocols propagate through populations: efficiency-safety trade-offs, power asymmetries, differential agency constraints, bandwidth limitations, and network topology factors. These pressures create a Darwinian landscape where protocols succeed not through optimality but through alignment with actor capabilities, incentive structures, and the cognitive and physical constraints of the systems in which they operate.

Timber Stinson-Schroff