markets, knowledgeI’m especially interested in markets for question-answering/knowledge sharing.
Recently Quora (a Q&A site similar to Stack Exchange) introduced a service called “ask-to-answer”. Basically, when you post questions, Quora algorithmically determines who might be an expert and able to answer your question.
You can then ask them to answer it by paying some number of “credits.” The answered then receives these credits. You can also earn these credits by posting good answers/questions, receiving upvotes, etc. The basic idea is to create a market in question-answering. For instance, if I’m a world expert in Auction Theory (i’m not!), I could answer auction theory questions that people have and then have it “paid back” by earning credits which I could use to have world experts in econometrics answer my questions. Somehow the price for asking someone to answer a question goes up with demand for that question-answerer.
There are also some examples of markets in swapping skills or knowledge of trades (e.g., http://www.swapaskill.com/). These are all small, but if they take off as Stack Overflow has, it would be nice to have an economic framework for thinking about these problems.
The standard GE model should work perfectly well in this context. Expertise in various disciplines are the goods, and credits the equivalent of money. To the extent that there are externalities some mild problems arise but we know well how to deal with those. Is there some reason why you think the regular model can’t deal with this case, because I don’t see any problem.
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