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type title author url date_published date_archived domain secondary_domains status processed_by tags sourced_via twitter_id
source Coasean Bargaining at Scale: Decentralization, coordination, and co-existence with AGI Seb Krier (Frontier Policy Development, Google DeepMind; personal capacity) https://blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/coasean-bargaining-at-scale 2025-09-26 2026-03-16 ai-alignment
collective-intelligence
teleological-economics
processing theseus
coase-theorem
transaction-costs
agent-governance
decentralization
coordination
Alex Obadia (@ObadiaAlex) tweet, ARIA Research Scaling Trust programme 712705562191011841

Coasean Bargaining at Scale

Krier argues AGI agents as personal advocates can dramatically reduce transaction costs, enabling Coasean bargaining at societal scale. Shifts governance from top-down central planning to bottom-up market coordination.

Key arguments:

  • Coasean private bargaining has been theoretically sound but practically impossible due to prohibitive transaction costs (discovery, negotiation, enforcement)
  • AI agents solve this: instant communication of granular preferences, hyper-granular contracting, automatic verification/enforcement
  • Three resulting governance principles: accountability (desires become priced offers), voluntary coalitions (diffuse interests band together at nanosecond speed), continuous self-calibration (rules flex based on live preference streams)
  • "Matryoshkan alignment" — nested governance: outer (legal/state), middle (competitive service providers), inner (individual customization)
  • Critical limitations acknowledged: wealth inequality, rights allocation remains constitutional/normative, catastrophic risks need state enforcement
  • Reframes alignment from engineering guarantees to institutional design

Directly relevant to coordination failures arise from individually rational strategies that produce collectively irrational outcomes and decentralized information aggregation outperforms centralized planning because dispersed knowledge cannot be collected into a single mind.