Market Policies

  Market policies can serve to support and uphold established business practices for a community as well as account for system externalities such as market creation costs. Policies can be implemented through either rules or incentives. For example, policy issues such as information access management [1], which determine who may access what collections and under what terms and conditions, are more naturally handled as rules. On the other hand, objectives such as increasing some social welfare criteria or providing a base level of library services to all patrons, may be more naturally implemented as incentives, perhaps subsidies or taxes.

Our focus is on policies related to market management costs. Since the number of possible markets is virtually unbounded, while the amount of network resources and agent attention is not, we consider what kinds of policies need to be employed to restrict market creation and select reasonable markets. In Section 4.1, we discuss the sources of market creation costs. In Section 4.2, we discuss the problem of who should decide what new markets can be created.