Carr-Benkler wager

The Carr-Benkler wager is between Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Carr about whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized systems.

History

The wager was proposed by Benkler in July 2006 in a comment to a blog post where Carr criticizes Benkler's views about volunteer peer-production. Benkler believes that by 2010 the major sites will have content provided by volunteers in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production, as in Wikipedia, Digg, Flickr and YouTube. Carr argues that the trend will favor content provided by paid workers, as in most traditional news outlets. [cite news |first= |last= |authorlink= |coauthors= |title=What is the Carr-Benkler wager? |url=http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/aug/03/guardianweeklytechnologysection |quote=On the two sides: Nicholas Carr, a former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review; and Yochai Benkler, a professor of law at Yale University whose book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, suggests that new types of collaboration let people be more productive than profit-seeking ventures. |work=The Guardian |date= |accessdate=2008-08-27 ] [cite news |first=Justin|last=Fox|authorlink= |coauthors= |title=Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free. |url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1590440-1,00.html |quote=In other fields, it's not so clear. In a critique of Benkler's work last summer, business writer Nicholas Carr speculated that Web 2.0 media sites like Digg, Flickr and YouTube are able to rely on volunteer contributions simply because a market has yet to emerge to price this "new kind of labor." He and Benkler then entered into what has come to be widely known in Web circles as the "Carr-Benkler wager": a bet on whether, by 2011, such sites will be driven primarily by volunteers or by professionals. |publisher=Time (magazine) |date=February 15, 2007 |accessdate=2007-03-03 ] [cite web | first=Nicholas | last=Carr | authorlink=Nicholas Carr |title=Calacanis's wallet and the Web 2.0 dream. | url=http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/07/jason_calacanis.php | accessdate=2007-10-24] [cite web | first=Yochai | last=Benkler | authorlink=Yochai Benkler |title=Benkler on Calacanis's wallet. | url=http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/07/benkler_on_cala.php | accessdate=2007-11-05]

ee also

*Gift economy

References