Tag Archives: TCE

Governance in Payments

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Long blog – Paid Content

Executive Summary

I’ve been writing about governance, trust, transaction costs and payments for a long time. In my view THE KEY to understanding how stablecoins, agentic, DeFi, Open Banking, tokenization and other payment innovations is governance. I seem to be the only one writing about it, so I don’t see a reason to stop now. Governance is the BIGGEST competitive moat for Visa and Mastercard, and its also the heart of their biggest break out growth opportunity. If you thought AI was transformational, radically reducing transaction costs (TCE per Nobel work of Ronald Coase) will dwarf it. In fact the monetization of AI is a Gordian knot of governance issues (see Agentic Commerce and Governance). 

Today I’m expanding on “value exchange” governance with 5 core themes.

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Agentic Commerce Economics and Governance

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The “Agentic Era,” promises to revolutionize commerce and customer experience by automating complex purchasing tasks. Agentic’s transformative potential is constrained by the lack of clearly defined shared economic models. 

While the vision of a decentralized Web 3.0 remains unfulfilled, the Agentic Era presents its own set of complex economic questions regarding value creation, distribution, and governance. This blog explores the challenges in establishing shared economic models for agentic commerce by taking a look at Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and Network Theory to analyze the interplay among consumers, merchants, AI agent platforms, and other stakeholders. We address issues of value attribution, data monetization, trust, risk allocation, permissions and the necessity for robust governance structures beyond mere technical interoperability.

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Commercial Models for AI Agents

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Short Blog.. but core to a new series that will attempt to address this strategic question

I find it hard to believe that anyone could keep up with the daily technical updates in AI, the pace of innovation is truly astounding. Given the completion of my recent agentic commerce survey, I thought I’d provide a few of my thoughts on the uncertainties surrounding the economics associated with AI agentic architectures.  While the technology is fascinating, the market operation of AI and Agents is nascent. How is value measured? How will it be monetized?  Who has the pricing power?  How will this impact existing markets, systems and participants? My perspective here is based upon my experience in networked businesses, but even more so in measurement (as CEO/Founder of Commerce Signals).

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Random Thoughts – Modularity and Trust

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Trust in a transaction. In another one of my favorite books  (Design Rules: modularity) there exists the concept of trust between physical components of an integrated system. This book stands in contrast to Nobel Economists’ work in defining the “Firm” and organizational boundaries in Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). But the technical theory of modularity is amazingly consistent with the concepts of “boundaries” in TCE. In modularity, there are 4 core rules for separating technical components:

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