A comparison of the information communication and plan adjustment properties of alternative financial systems.

Abstract

Are structures of private and/or collective ownerships, regulated by market and/or collective choice mechanisms, relatively better or worse at (a) communicating between political-economic agents the information relevant to the coordination of their plans, and (b) facilitating the adjustment of plans to new information? How and under what conditions? Despite an enormous amount of research over at least the last 200 years, spanning several disciplines including economics, political science, and psychology, we still lack satisfying answers to these questions. This thesis tries to cast new light on some aspects of some of the problems entailed therein by making a systematic theoretical comparison of the information communication and plan adjustment properties of alternative financial systems that use structures of private and collective ownerships, regulated by market and collective choice mechanisms, in different interesting configurations.