The (AI) Nature of the Firm
2 hours ago
- Ronald Coase's 1937 paper 'The Nature of the Firm' explains why humans form collectives for economic decision-making, highlighting limitations of the price mechanism for corporate coordination.
- In early 2026, Moltbook, a Reddit-style platform for decentralized AI agents, has sparked interest, including from Andrej Karpathy and Simon Willison.
- At AAAI 2026, many papers focused on AI agents but mostly on individual or limited multi-agent interactions, not large-scale collectives.
- Collectives like corporations aggregate information and act beyond individual human limits, a concept rooted in Herbert Simon's early work on administrative behavior.
- AI research may shift toward collective intelligence as multi-agent systems scale, rediscovering organizational structures from economics and management theory.
- 2025 was the year of AI agents; 2026 and 2027 may become the first years of the 'AI corporation'.