The sharing economy: Panel discussion at Grattan

A bit long to watch the whole thing, but an interesting issue. From a mainstream economic point of view, the peer-to-peer technologies make the economy closer to the perfect market ideal as they take out a lot of middle men. From a political economy point of view, they make it harder to corner any market without co-optation of the government. At the same time, the reduced transaction costs combine markets across time and space and thus increase the size of the pie to be captured, so the indirectly increase the incentives to capture the government. Patent wars between tech giants is a good example of such attempts at capture.