RE: Planned Obsolescence?
Interesting comment.
"A little recognized consequence to this is something I call 'Inverse Occam's Razor'. In domains subject to competition, when the complexity of competitors is low, Occam's Razor roughly holds as a good description of action causes. As the complexity of competition rises toward infinity, Occam's Razor completely inverts and the most accurate description of the reasons for actions will drawn from the pool of descriptions with the most complexity."
While I understand that Occam's Razor implies simplicity as the best explanation, in complex systems, such as you describe here, it still completely applies. I suspect you do know and agree, but point out how Occam's Razor applied to complex systems seems to devolve to complex solutions. The essential fact of Occam's Razor, that the simplest explanation applies, remains evident even in complex systems, as the advantageous features of the many aspects of complex systems each apply where they do, and the aggregate result of such advantage is complex. Despite complexity being extant, the most competitive mechanism still tends to be the simplest preferential system, and Occam's Razor is confirmed, generally. In markets that are governed by subjective, rather than naturally occurring and objectively preferable, design, products don't always conform to Occam's Razor.
Thus arises competition. It is not uncommon for a product to rise to dominate a market for reasons unrelated to it's design features, such as marketing. Subjectivity of markets doesn't disprove Occam's Razor, but do indicate that very complex systems involving subective interpretations by people of desirability can make even the simplest solution inexplicably complex.
"Contrary to 'free markets' being the stable point of economic competition, it is a transitory phase of an immature market. The stable point is a single dominant competitor, which once it arises has an accelerating advantage over other competitors -i.e. a monopoly."
This is only true in a market with immutable factors. Given technological advance, variable supply of materials, and evolving demand, monopolies aren't actually stable. Only when collusion and corruption of free markets prevail (as inevitably are engendered by government) are monopolies even very common. Since presently government is invariably a feature of markets, and very little acknowledgment of the corruption government exerts is accounted for in economic theory, you are more right than wrong regarding monopoly. I agree these 'embedded interests' prefer to keep this understanding cryptic, as well.
Thanks!
Regarding Occam's razor, I don't find your dichotomy useful. That isn't to say the way you break it down doesn't have value or is wrong. Don't worry, my agreeing with it or not shouldn't affect the utility of your version for you at all. True things aren't affected by popularity in the slightest.
Expand your intended meaning for 'immutable factors'. So far I disagree, but perhaps if you elaborate it I can understand in what sense it is true in the way you are using it.
When the technology does not advance, neither supply nor demand are variable, governmental regulation will not change, etc. Those critical factors being immutable potentiate persistent monopoly. Where these factors can change, disruption can occur, and monopolies broken.
I rather prefer being proven wrong than not. I get to learn stuff.
Thanks!
I was including capacity to react to perturbations as part of the meaning of competition- with better competitors having more capacity to react. To you point: A highly turbulent market seems to require competitors to spend more resources reacting automatically decreasing the amount of value that a monopoly can just extract directly without endangering its own viability/market position. ..So you are right, 'market volatility' seems to be a factor that opposes some characteristics of monopolies.
I try to translate the problem into information theory so I can access those tools. In doing that, I was using a signal model as an analog of market conditions to represent the sum of the forces acting on the market. You can imagine a signal that moves around quasi-randomly, sometimes with large amplitude changes, sometimes with changes happening quickly with high frequency. An impossibly competitive and efficient player would conform to that signal exactly. The difference between the 'true' market signal and the signal that a competitor generates is a measure of how efficient that competitor is in the market and how much value they can extract. I find thinking of it this way is somewhat generative - despite the obvious difficulty of translating an actual market into this abstract form.
I can see how models of markets would be potentiated at this point by such signal substitution for what are presently ineffable non-random effects. Such models would reveal many interesting things about markets, and I suspect would particularly reveal the far more substantial than expected influence of corruption. My guess is that as various influences were quantized, more and more of the cryptic influences would be shown to be such collusive forces.
I am well heartened to hear of your work in this regard.
Thanks!