¤help by Stephen Compall ¤help is a collaborative, collective task management tool. It is designed to apply financial economics (hence the universal currency sign `¤' in the name) to make a team of individual actors with varying skillsets more efficient. * Applying finance to task management We ascribe financial terminology to many real-world concepts that are not ordinarily thought of in such terms. For example, a manager may "sell" (assign) a task to an actor, who will receive a larger sum upon completion of the task. This helps to ensure that only those who have the cash reserves (have the time) can handle it will take on the task, and that those in debt (behind on tasks) will not. Managers, or those who do not participate in the market but sell tasks and reward for completion, are like the central bankers of the system. They are responsible for the stability of the market, and should not participate in it otherwise. Efficient actors, by learning how the currency flows work, can perform arbitrage by subdividing tasks into simpler tasks whose total net completion reward sum is less than the original net completion reward (the reward minus the assignment cost), thus increasing the total efficiency with which a task was completed. * Extension possibilities Some teams may wish to reduce the strength of outliers by applying a redistributive "tax", or better yet, reducing the likelihood of currency hoarding (which an economist will tell you is inefficient, and not at all the same as extreme wealth) by providing valuable investment vehicles that yield in real-world or ¤-denominated benefits. There is no debt mechanism at the moment besides "pocket loans" made for free after certain purchases as an economic expediency. * Questions ** How much should I charge and pay for tasks? One fascinating thing about capitalist financial systems is how they decide prices. Real-world currency, much like ¤help's `¤' currency, has no intrinsic value; prices are determined instinctively by society, unconsciously weighing the relative values of goods and services. With a little trial-and-error, I believe you will discover that you are better at choosing ¤help's prices than you might think. However, you will do even better if you keep in mind some of the science of pricing, which is all related to observing the behavior of other economic actors: The cost of a task contract should reflect how much of a load it will put on the buyer, and the risk you take that the buyer will not deliver a solution by the delivery time. The completion reward should reflect the solution's value to you, which may be its value outside the system if you are a manager. If no one is buying your tasks, you are either charging too much, offering too little reward, or providing unappealing terms: no one will buy an impossible task. Certainly you will have no trouble selling tasks if you are offering too much reward or charging too little. How can you tell? Watch the markets. If you are offering too easy terms, then speculators can profit by buying and reselling your tasks. They earn for both their wisdom in the market and the risk they take that no one will repurchase the task. ** Why can managers create ¤ from nothing? How do we keep it under control? Managers are the independent central bankers of the system. Because they do not participate in ¤help-level task completion, they do not earn; they must nevertheless be able to pay for task completion. This raises the risk of inflation. While there is much disagreement in this field, I follow Milton Friedman and the monetarist's belief that inflation follows growth in the money supply above growth in the rate of economic output. Furthermore, the position of the Federal Open Market Committee at this time is that economic stability follows price stability, meaning a low inflation rate. (Any kind of deflation, or increase in the implied value of ¤1, is bad.) There are many ways to keep the money supply under control. First, consider taxes, as further described below. A more meritocratic approach would be for the managers to sell real-world benefits for ¤help currency that would then be removed from the economy -- a gold star, extra break time, work machine upgrades, or even real-world currency are among the possibilities. Just keep in mind that a little inflation is far better than a little deflation. ** Why should we charge for tasks? I originally did not envision charging for tasks, but thinking about it in financial terms yet again revealed something I did not understand before about the problem of issuing tasks. In financial terms, a task is a contract for future delivery of its completion. This description should evoke something if you have ever read the "Commodities" section of the financial pages: futures contracts are used to cushion buyers and sellers of goods from market fluctuations, by way of arbitrage performed by speculators in the market who absorb the fluctuations through positions taken by buying and selling contracts for future delivery. The value of a contract can be positive or negative, depending on the difference between the market-anticipated value at the delivery time and the payment promised by the contract at delivery. However, because task completion implies a time-to-¤ conversion, its value is always positive. Because it delivers a net benefit to the holder, minus the incompletion risk, minus the time taken to perform the task, tasks should cost. Allowing someone to take a task also implies risk for the issuer -- that the task will not be completed. Because in this case the buyer will simply lose what she originally paid, this risk should be priced into the task cost. You might think that the solution for this would be to simply allow anyone to work on and submit solutions, the first appropriate one receiving the reward. However, I wished to remove duplicate work in this system which is anyway intended for ultimately cooperative teams, so I required the economy to reflect that requirement, and I believe this system will more efficiently divide tasks in such groups than more informal alternatives. ** Why can't I just cancel a task I created after I sell it? It may seem fair enough and more efficient for a team to be able to cancel tasks whose results are no longer needed, a refund of course provided to the buyer. Perhaps surprisingly, allowing this generally would imply several undesirable distortions for the task market as a whole: 1. Every single task would have to price in a cancellation-risk premium, paid by a reward increase or cost decrease, making the completion economy less efficient by inventing a risk that does not exist in most cases. 2. It would ceiling the value of many financial positions, removing valuable economic signals. For example, if the intrinsic value of a task completion went down, the issuer could simply cancel, preventing the buyer -- who took the risk of a *rise* in intrinsic value -- from profiting by completion or selling the task. 3. The buyer, who is obliged to complete the task or lose the reward as well as initial payment, would be subject to losing the reward even after completing part or all of the task. Because a cancelled task is a mistake on the part of the issuer, not the buyer, the issuer should bear that risk. A contract is a contract is a contract. You can cancel it if you buy the task back from its current holder; this is the only economically fair way to handle these situations. If you wish to allow cancellation anyway, you can prearrange the buyback price; beware that this will not remove the risk premium to the buyer. We allow managers to cancel in general, so you should always price in a cancellation risk. It is my belief that scrutiny of these ¤help central bankers will reduce the probability of bad behavior like that described in #2 above. ** Why do debts go into default? (This is theoretical, of course, because the debt system has not been implemented.) Since the system provides "pocket loans" already, one might think that creditors should be paid out of pocket loans even if the debtor already has negative currency on hand. This would be far more dangerous than it sounds. By providing a "lender of last resort" with such easy money terms, we would create a moral hazard, encouraging creditors to lend far too much, far too cheaply to those with shaky balance sheets, and encouraging debtors to borrow far too much. This would draw too much capital from other investments, as debt would essentially be a positive-yield, risk-free investment. It would also distort the debt market internally, because "riskier" debtors would no longer be required to pay more interest. By having a default mechanism instead, creditors are forced to price in default risk when making loans, fluctuations in this risk for particular debtors are reflected in the market value of debt, and the yield of a debt investment properly reflects its risk. ** Why should I tax? Taxation serves two purposes in our system. First, it prevents the money supply from growing too much; growing money supply produces inflation, too much of which is undesirable. I do not at all advocate fixing the amount of money in the system; the supply should be left to grow organically, as it were, loosely reflecting the rate of production (by way of task completion or what have you). Second, while inflation also helps, it slows successful financial actors from building reserves to the point that they effectively become managers. Theoretically, this may actually be a desirable outcome, so do not be too quick to implement drastic measures like requiring task purchase or expropriating assets from the "rich"; indeed, these measures may hurt task completion more than they compel the victim to replace it, by reducing market confidence in the central bank. The market may in fact be indicating that these actors are *more valuable* to your team as managers. In any case, the "slow burn" of tax and inflation combined with adjustments in incentives and sales of real-world goods and services for ¤ is a far better alternative. An important safeguard against inflation is to make sure that managers creating tasks (who effectively have money-printing power) do not pay too much for completed tasks. They should understand the pricing guidelines given for a previous question. If you are worried about the economic implications of removing currency so regularly, just imagine that it is being converted to pay-by-time. I recommend keeping this association in the abstract, however.