The Culture of “We”
What do Zopa, Uber, Wikipedia, and Tinder all have in common? The answer is a network structure based entirely on sharing and trust that may hold the answer to solving global climate change, pollution, and poverty. They represent one of the oldest tactics to survival and coincidentally one of the largest trending ideas in the 21st century: collaborative consumption. Using game theory, we can understand why sharing is in our genes and how technology can facilitate the mechanics of trust in our new global network.
15000 years ago, the hunter-gatherer nomadic tribes depended on collaboration for survival. In essence, this was a game of two players: the hunter and the gatherer. Assuming each player specialized in their area of expertise (i.e. the hunter was an expert hunter and so on), it can be shown through a payoff matrix that collaboration represented a pure Nash equilibrium in this game. Lets take an example in which the players ignore each other. In this case, the hunter must hunt for prey and also gather wood to make fires and spears. While the hunter is good at hunting, he is slow at gathering supplies which takes time away from what he is good at. The same, but opposite applies to the gatherer. Now, if they both work together, the hunter can spend all of his time hunting while the gatherer can spend all his time gathering. With a basic understanding of microeconomics and the theory of comparative advantage, we can see that the highest payoff for both players is to cooperate. The key point to understand is that specialization would be nothing without collaboration.
The same idea for survival extends today into the areas of knowledge and wealth. Take for example the website, Wikipedia. Now for everyone besides your high school teachers who forbid you use Wikipedia as a source in your research paper, the webpage is one of the largest world-wide communities of and sources of knowledge. The idea is based on peer-to-peer collaborators. On Wikipedia’s page, one of the reasons for creating an account is that it “lets you build trust and respect through a history of good edits, and makes it easier for veteran users to assume good faith, communicate and collaborate.” Reputation begets trust, and trust begets community. The second and probably the largest area of recent 21st century collaboration is in wealth. This is surfaced in the form of redistribution markets and product benefit systems. The first of these, redistribution markets has became the fourth ‘R’ in the 3’R’s we all learned in elementary school: reduce, reuse, recycle, and now redistribute. Based on the idea that we can share resources without sacrificing, companies like Zopa, Ebay, and Swap Tree have flourished while accessing the benefit of an object without ownership has allowed Uber and Lyft (car sharing companies) to gain footholds in today’s urban economies. Even companies like google encourage of a culture of “we” in their employee workspaces to share skills and time so performance, efficiency, and ultimately, payoffs increase.
The 21st century is the relationship era. Nowadays, who you know is more important than what you know. The goal of many technologies is to push this idea back into the consumer behavior of human beings. As a culture of “we” that relies on sharing over the global “village” of the internet, collaboration is the key to succeed in the modern age.
Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/rachel_botsman_the_case_for_collaborative_consumption#t-973921