Trust is important in economies for reducing the cost of trade. But the marketplace has been a place where a few bad actors have driven down the general social level of trust. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely & some other researchers set out to measure how much trust people have in the market. They set up
For 100 years, Sears ran a platform economy via its Sears catalogue. People spread across vast remote regions could get information about goods & order them for delivery, greatly reducing transaction costs. Sears wasn’t selling stoves, cattle feed, or clothing so much as it was providing information & connecting people. It shut down its famous
