Contribution Systems

Abstract

We propose the idea that ‘contribution systems’ are a new class of economic mechanism. Like firms, they organise production with purpose, but they do not use contracts. Like markets, they are permissionless to enter, but they do not do exchange. Like commons, they pool resources and are egalitarian, but they enable reward. They don't use prices, but they compute value. They don't have leaders or owners, but they are goal-oriented. They are a type of economic institution that is a production mechanism and an allocation mechanism, and which creates and distributes value, and so is a type of economy. Yet while this economy shares many similarities with existing economic mechanisms, it is not quite any one of them, but a new hybrid object. A contribution system is an economic platypus. And our purpose here is to report some early and new sightings.