Am reading a new book by Martin A. Nowak titled “Super Cooperators” which explores the ways and reasons humans cooperate. I picked this up because it seemed to correlate to the work I was involved with when at marketumbrella.org, measuring social capital with their NEED tool. NEED (still in pilot but I believe getting closer to an online tool like SEED) measures the quality and quantity of transactions within market communities (included neighbors who feel its impact) to get at levels of trust. Trust is a proxy for social capital. Adding social capital to markets is important because it means behavior change is possible.
So, in markets, engineering cooperation is the main activity used to add trust. The market organization is essentially using direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and spatial laws to add levels of cooperation-all terms learned from this book.
I like the author’s definition of cooperation:
The willingness to give something up in order for someone else to receive a benefit.
In a sentence, this may describe the positive transactional nature of markets rather than a roadside stand or a storefront. The multiplicity of vendors often directly competing yet cooperating, shows a sophisticated awareness of the need to offer choice to shoppers and on another level, cooperating as a community to add innovation or programs lead markets to a more successful future.