I've been working with Britt Blaser and Flemming Funch on the design of the Xpertweb and it has got me thinking about a number of questions raised in recent years about the role of the buyer, the employee and the citizen, who always seem to come out on the short end of the deal when there is some pre-existing power arrayed against them....
The buyer has needed to be wary since the Romans coined the phrase "caveat emptor" to excuse the seller of poorly made goods or poorly preserved foods. If you were too damned stupid to recognize that your fish sauce was spoiled, tough luck. What Xpertweb does, by flipping the process of a transaction around and making payment dependent on the delivery of quality and quantity promises (whether of stuff or services), is give us the potential for an economic system that both improves the seller's responsiveness to the customer and eliminates the free-rider problem that could afflict a system of payment after delivery....
The full flower of individual choice will come in the midst of what free marketers have espoused despite it's total absence: massively accessible information for decision-making. As a tool for recording accountability, Xpertweb is a model for what is needed: It doesn't impose any particular structure and can work to support interactions among equals in a variety of settings.
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