Asymmetric Information is an economic inefficiency. On its face, it should be eliminated. Cato Institute describes a trend which appears inexorable. Yet, Asymm

Asymmetric Information is an economic inefficiency. On its face, it should be eliminated. Cato Institute describes a trend which appears inexorable. Yet, Asymmetric Information does allow various agencies to attempt to add value by exploiting those inefficiencies. Remove asymmetry and we are left with perfectly efficient markets whose value accrues, not to the participants, but to the owners of the marketplaces: those who have access to sufficient capital to operate at scale large enough to drive down margins to where only they can compete. My view is that agents, including individuals, must strive to preserve their economic advantage by jealously guarding their information streams and by poisoning competitors' streams with respect to data in which they have an economic interest. Thereby, the inefficiencies of asymmetric information may be eliminated, as they should be. But the value of doing so will tend to be shared among all those who have an economic interest in adding value, by increasing efficiency. Thus a new information marketplace can be realised: one in which value from efficiency is distributed, rather than centralised. To achieve this, massively decentralised information architectures are required.