Chris Berg

With Darcy W.E. Allen. Available at SSRN.

Abstract: Ex ante digital-platform competition regimes designate specific firms as platforms and attach conduct obligations to them as a class. We locate the fundamental error one level deeper than existing critiques. Platforms are ongoing processes of capital recomposition whose apparent durability is produced by the capability activity that sustains them. We give dynamic-capabilities theory Austrian microfoundations: sensing is Kirznerian alertness, seizing is Knight-Mises judgment under genuine uncertainty, and reconfiguring is Lachmannian recomposition of heterogeneous capital. Each generates a distinct impossibility for the ex ante regulator. The designation form mistakes legal continuity and observed market position for stability in the economic object being governed.

Available at SSRN.

Abstract: Regulation is imposed on regulatory objects: persons, firms, transactions, products, services, infrastructures, duties, relationships and prohibited acts to which obligations and liabilities can attach. This paper argues that general-purpose computation creates a distinctive problem of regulatory-object construction and a hard limit on object-specific regulation of computable capabilities. Because computable capabilities can be copied, modified, self-hosted, forked and reimplemented across general-purpose infrastructure, the same regulated function can move between regulatory objects. The paper develops a predictive theory of regulatory-object stability: the regulable substrate of any activity is its non-computable fraction. For activities expressible in computational form, targeting the non-substitutable substrate is impossible without being overbroad.

With Darcy W.E. Allen. Available at SSRN.

Abstract: This paper develops a public-choice theory of firm response to multi-sided market collapse and illustrates it through Australia’s news media bargaining regime. When one side of a multi-sided market is unbundled, disintermediated or competed away, the shock can propagate across the platform’s entire business model. This creates an incentive for incumbent firms to reconstruct lost market sides politically by compelling adjacent firms to become substitute funders. Australia’s evolving news media bargaining regime illustrates this mechanism. Because adjacency is a political construction rather than an economic relationship, the regime is unstable: as targeted firms respond, the basis on which they are made to pay must be rebuilt on different grounds.

With Darcy W.E. Allen. Available at SSRN.

Abstract: The AI “paperclip maximiser” parable describes a superintelligent agent whose faithful pursuit of a single objective becomes catastrophic. Standard economic analysis frames this as a principal-agent or incomplete-contracting problem. We argue that the AI paperclip maximiser is better understood as a problem of multiple agents coordinating under uncertainty and under sets of rules: a problem of constitutional political economy. The relevant knowledge is dispersed, tacit and generated through parallel experimentation by multiple sovereign agents. The instrumental-convergence thesis must therefore be extended with two additional drives: tolerance of multipolarity and constitutional cooperation. Resources spent on predation and defence impede the maximiser’s terminal goal, making constitutional rules beneficial even to a dominant AI agent.