Co-Utility in the Digital Economy: Conciliating Individual Freedom and Common Good in the Information Society

Identificador:  TDX:2572

Handle: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11797/TDX2572

Autores:  Turi, Abeba Nigussie

Resumen:
The collaborative economy refers to the digital economy of the millennial era which relies on the information technology as the main catalyst. Mesh, peer or sharing economy are the other terms that are interchangeably used to refer to the hybrid market models of this economy. Financial technologies, including the business lines of peer-to-peer transactions, the crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, innovation and educational marketplaces, are some of the common structures of this economy. It is mainly characterized by the disintermediation of the traditional centralized form of economic system. The peer-to-peer business models underlying this economic system are enabled by the digital platforms that facilitate direct peer-to-peer transactions. As this collaborative form of value creation emerges and the economic system gets more complicated, the system becomes prone to many serious problems that hamper its efficiency. Some of the new challenges and uncertainties currently arising in this economic system include privacy risks, security and operational risks (dangers of fraud, cybercrime and operational outages), platform failure, lack of trust between the transacting peers resulting from the information asymmetry, risk of default, usury and systemic financial risks due to liquidity, and credit risks with the business cycle uncertainties. Apart from its externalities to the traditional business models and incumbent players, this economic system also poses a challenge to the government in enacting new rules and regulations that govern the new businesses models and hence disrupts the government revenues at its current stage of growth. In this work, we aim at approaching this economic system and tackle some of the aforementioned problems associated with it by introducing the notion of co-utility, which adheres to the self-governance principle. By considering specific use cases of the collaborative economy business models and identifying the case-specific problems, we design co-utile protocols through incentive mechanisms that can tackle the underlying problems.