Archives For Alchian

Kochland: An Inadvertent Paean to the Glories of the Free Market

Kristian Stout —  5 September 2019

A recently published book, “Kochland – The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America” by Christopher Leonard, presents a gripping account of relentless innovation and the power of the entrepreneur to overcome adversity in pursuit of delivering superior goods and services to the market while also reaping impressive profits. It’s truly an inspirational American story.

Now, I should note that I don’t believe Mr. Leonard actually intended his book to be quite so complimentary to the Koch brothers and the vast commercial empire they built up over the past several decades. He includes plenty of material detailing, for example, their employees playing fast and loose with environmental protection rules, or their labor lawyers aggressively bargaining with unions, sometimes to the detriment of workers. And all of the stories he presents are supported by sympathetic emotional appeals through personal anecdotes. 

But, even then, many of the negative claims are part of a larger theme of Koch Industries progressively improving its business practices. One prominent example is how Koch Industries learned from its environmentally unfriendly past and implemented vigorous programs to ensure “10,000% compliance” with all federal and state environmental laws. 

What really stands out across most or all of the stories Leonard has to tell, however, is the deep appreciation that Charles Koch and his entrepreneurially-minded employees have for the fundamental nature of the market as an information discovery process. Indeed, Koch Industries has much in common with modern technology firms like Amazon in this respect — but decades before the information technology revolution made the full power of “Big Data” gathering and processing as obvious as it is today.

The impressive information operation of Koch Industries

Much of Kochland is devoted to stories in which Koch Industries’ ability to gather and analyze data from across its various units led to the production of superior results for the economy and consumers. For example,  

Koch… discovered that the National Parks Service published data showing the snow pack in the California mountains, data that Koch could analyze to determine how much water would be flowing in future months to generate power at California’s hydroelectric plants. This helped Koch predict with great accuracy the future supply of electricity and the resulting demand for natural gas.

Koch Industries was able to use this information to anticipate the amount of power (megawatt hours) it needed to deliver to the California power grid (admittedly, in a way that was somewhat controversial because of poorly drafted legislation relating to the new regulatory regime governing power distribution and resale in the state).

And, in 2000, while many firms in the economy were still riding the natural gas boom of the 90s, 

two Koch analysts and a reservoir engineer… accurately predicted a coming disaster that would contribute to blackouts along the West Coast, the bankruptcy of major utilities, and skyrocketing costs for many consumers.

This insight enabled Koch Industries to reap huge profits in derivatives trading, and it also enabled it to enter — and essentially rescue — a market segment crucial for domestic farmers: nitrogen fertilizer.

The market volatility in natural gas from the late 90s through early 00s wreaked havoc on the nitrogen fertilizer industry, for which natural gas is the primary input. Farmland — a struggling fertilizer producer — had progressively mismanaged its business over the preceding two decades by focusing on developing lines of business outside of its core competencies, including blithely exposing itself to the volatile natural gas market in pursuit of short-term profits. By the time it was staring bankruptcy in the face, there were no other companies interested in acquiring it. 

Koch’s analysts, however, noticed that many of Farmland’s key fertilizer plants were located in prime locations for reaching local farmers. Once the market improved, whoever controlled those key locations would be in a superior position for selling into the nitrogen fertilizer market. So, by utilizing the data it derived from its natural gas operations (both operating pipelines and storage facilities, as well as understanding the volatility of gas prices and availability through its derivatives trading operations), Koch Industries was able to infer that it could make substantial profits by rescuing this bankrupt nitrogen fertilizer business. 

Emblematic of Koch’s philosophy of only making long-term investments, 

[o]ver the next ten years, [Koch Industries] spent roughly $500 million to outfit the plants with new technology while streamlining production… Koch installed a team of fertilizer traders in the office… [t]he traders bought and sold supplies around the globe, learning more about fertilizer markets each day. Within a few years, Koch Fertilizer built a global distribution network. Koch founded a new company, called Koch Energy Services, which bought and sold natural gas supplies to keep the fertilizer plants stocked.

Thus, Koch Industries not only rescued midwest farmers from shortages that would have decimated their businesses, it invested heavily to ensure that production would continue to increase to meet future demand. 

As noted, this acquisition was consistent with the ethos of Koch Industries, which stressed thinking about investments as part of long-term strategies, in contrast to their “counterparties in the market [who] were obsessed with the near-term horizon.” This led Koch Industries to look at investments over a period measured in years or decades, an approach that allowed the company to execute very intricate investment strategies: 

If Koch thought there was going to be an oversupply of oil in the Gulf Coast region, for example, it might snap up leases on giant oil barges, knowing that when the oversupply hit, companies would be scrambling for extra storage space and willing to pay a premium for the leases that Koch bought on the cheap. This was a much safer way to execute the trade than simply shorting the price of oil—even if Koch was wrong about the supply glut, the downside was limited because Koch could still sell or use the barge leases and almost certainly break even.

Entrepreneurs, regulators, and the problem of incentives

All of these accounts and more in Kochland brilliantly demonstrate a principal salutary role of entrepreneurs in the market, which is to discover slack or scarce resources in the system and manage them in a way that they will be available for utilization when demand increases. Guaranteeing the presence of oil barges in the face of market turbulence, or making sure that nitrogen fertilizer is available when needed, is precisely the sort of result sound public policy seeks to encourage from firms in the economy. 

Government, by contrast — and despite its best intentions — is institutionally incapable of performing the same sorts of entrepreneurial activities as even very large private organizations like Koch Industries. The stories recounted in Kochland demonstrate this repeatedly. 

For example, in the oil tanker episode, Koch’s analysts relied on “huge amounts of data from outside sources” – including “publicly available data…like the federal reports that tracked the volume of crude oil being stored in the United States.” Yet, because that data was “often stale” owing to a rigid, periodic publication schedule, it lacked the specificity necessary for making precise interventions in markets. 

Koch’s analysts therefore built on that data using additional public sources, such as manifests from the Customs Service which kept track of the oil tanker traffic in US waters. Leveraging all of this publicly available data, Koch analysts were able to develop “a picture of oil shipments and flows that was granular in its specificity.”

Similarly, when trying to predict snowfall in the western US, and how that would affect hydroelectric power production, Koch’s analysts relied on publicly available weather data — but extended it with their own analytical insights to make it more suitable to fine-grained predictions. 

By contrast, despite decades of altering the regulatory scheme around natural gas production, transport and sales, and being highly involved in regulating all aspects of the process, the federal government could not even provide the data necessary to adequately facilitate markets. Koch’s energy analysts would therefore engage in various deals that sometimes would only break even — if it meant they could develop a better overall picture of the relevant markets: 

As was often the case at Koch, the company… was more interested in the real-time window that origination deals could provide into the natural gas markets. Just as in the early days of the crude oil markets, information about prices was both scarce and incredibly valuable. There were not yet electronic exchanges that showed a visible price of natural gas, and government data on sales were irregular and relatively slow to come. Every origination deal provided fresh and precise information about prices, supply, and demand.

In most, if not all, of the deals detailed in Kochland, government regulators had every opportunity to find the same trends in the publicly available data — or see the same deficiencies in the data and correct them. Given their access to the same data, government regulators could, in some imagined world, have developed policies to mitigate the effects of natural gas market collapses, handle upcoming power shortages, or develop a reliable supply of fertilizer to midwest farmers. But they did not. Indeed, because of the different sets of incentives they face (among other factors), in the real world, they cannot do so, despite their best intentions.

The incentive to innovate

This gets to the core problem that Hayek described concerning how best to facilitate efficient use of dispersed knowledge in such a way as to achieve the most efficient allocation and distribution of resources: 

The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process, and the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system.

The question of how best to utilize dispersed knowledge in society can only be answered by considering who is best positioned to gather and deploy that knowledge. There is no fundamental objection to “planning”  per se, as Hayek notes. Indeed, in a complex society filled with transaction costs, there will need to be entities capable of internalizing those costs  — corporations or governments — in order to make use of the latent information in the system. The question is about what set of institutions, and what set of incentives governing those institutions, results in the best use of that latent information (and the optimal allocation and distribution of resources that follows from that). 

Armen Alchian captured the different incentive structures between private firms and government agencies well: 

The extent to which various costs and effects are discerned, measured and heeded depends on the institutional system of incentive-punishment for the deciders. One system of rewards-punishment may increase the extent to which some objectives are heeded, whereas another may make other goals more influential. Thus procedures for making or controlling decisions in one rewards-incentive system are not necessarily the “best” for some other system…

In the competitive, private, open-market economy, the wealth-survival prospects are not as strong for firms (or their employees) who do not heed the market’s test of cost effectiveness as for firms who do… as a result the market’s criterion is more likely to be heeded and anticipated by business people. They have personal wealth incentives to make more thorough cost-effectiveness calculations about the products they could produce …

In the government sector, two things are less effective. (1) The full cost and value consequences of decisions do not have as direct and severe a feedback impact on government employees as on people in the private sector. The costs of actions under their consideration are incomplete simply because the consequences of ignoring parts of the full span of costs are less likely to be imposed on them… (2) The effectiveness, in the sense of benefits, of their decisions has a different reward-inventive or feedback system … it is fallacious to assume that government officials are superhumans, who act solely with the national interest in mind and are never influenced by the consequences to their own personal position.

In short, incentives matter — and are a function of the institutional arrangement of the system. Given the same set of data about a scarce set of resources, over the long run, the private sector generally has stronger incentives to manage resources efficiently than does government. As Ludwig von Mises showed, moving those decisions into political hands creates a system of political preferences that is inherently inferior in terms of the production and distribution of goods and services.

Koch Industries: A model of entrepreneurial success

The market is not perfect, but no human institution is perfect. Despite its imperfections, the market provides the best system yet devised for fairly and efficiently managing the practically unlimited demands we place on our scarce resources. 

Kochland provides a valuable insight into the virtues of the market and entrepreneurs, made all the stronger by Mr. Leonard’s implied project of “exposing” the dark underbelly of Koch Industries. The book tells the bad tales, which I’m willing to believe are largely true. I would, frankly, be shocked if any large entity — corporation or government — never ran into problems with rogue employees, internal corporate dynamics gone awry, or a failure to properly understand some facet of the market or society that led to bad investments or policy. 

The story of Koch Industries — presented even as it is through the lens of a “secret history”  — is deeply admirable. It’s the story of a firm that not only learns from its own mistakes, as all firms must do if they are to survive, but of a firm that has a drive to learn in its DNA. Koch Industries relentlessly gathers information from the market, sometimes even to the exclusion of short-term profit. It eschews complex bureaucratic structures and processes, which encourages local managers to find opportunities and nimbly respond.

Kochland is a quick read that presents a gripping account of one of America’s corporate success stories. There is, of course, a healthy amount of material in the book covering the Koch brothers’ often controversial political activities. Nonetheless, even those who hate the Koch brothers on account of politics would do well to learn from the model of entrepreneurial success that Kochland cannot help but describe in its pages. 

In Amazon, Corporate & Securities Law, Platforms, Truth on the Market , , , , , , , , ,
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Understanding ownership and property in the Digital Age

Geoffrey Manne & Neil Turkewitz —  22 March 2017

What does it mean to “own” something? A simple question (with a complicated answer, of course) that, astonishingly, goes unasked in a recent article in the Pennsylvania Law Review entitled, What We Buy When We “Buy Now,” by Aaron Perzanowski and Chris Hoofnagle (hereafter “P&H”). But how can we reasonably answer the question they pose without first trying to understand the nature of property interests?

P&H set forth a simplistic thesis for their piece: when an e-commerce site uses the term “buy” to indicate the purchase of digital media (instead of the term “license”), it deceives consumers. This is so, the authors assert, because the common usage of the term “buy” indicates that there will be some conveyance of property that necessarily includes absolute rights such as alienability, descendibility, and excludability, and digital content doesn’t generally come with these attributes. The authors seek to establish this deception through a poorly constructed survey regarding consumers’ understanding of the parameters of their property interests in digitally acquired copies. (The survey’s considerable limitations is a topic for another day….)

The issue is more than merely academic: NTIA and the USPTO have just announced that they will hold a public meeting

to discuss how best to communicate to consumers regarding license terms and restrictions in connection with online transactions involving copyrighted works… [as a precursor to] the creation of a multistakeholder process to establish best practices to improve consumers’ understanding of license terms and restrictions in connection with online transactions involving creative works.

Whatever the results of that process, it should not begin, or end, with P&H’s problematic approach.

Getting to their conclusion that platforms are engaged in deceptive practices requires two leaps of faith: First, that property interests are absolute and that any restraint on the use of “property” is inconsistent with the notion of ownership; and second, that consumers’ stated expectations (even assuming that they were measured correctly) alone determine the appropriate contours of legal (and economic) property interests. Both leaps are meritless.

Property and ownership are not absolute concepts

P&H are in such a rush to condemn downstream restrictions on the alienability of digital copies that they fail to recognize that “property” and “ownership” are not absolute terms, and are capable of being properly understood only contextually. Our very notions of what objects may be capable of ownership change over time, along with the scope of authority over owned objects. For P&H, the fact that there are restrictions on the use of an object means that it is not properly “owned.” But that overlooks our everyday understanding of the nature of property.

Ownership is far more complex than P&H allow, and ownership limited by certain constraints is still ownership. As Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz note in The Property Right Paradigm (1973):

In common speech, we frequently speak of someone owning this land, that house, or these bonds. This conversational style undoubtedly is economical from the viewpoint of quick communication, but it masks the variety and complexity of the ownership relationship. What is owned are rights to use resources, including one’s body and mind, and these rights are always circumscribed, often by the prohibition of certain actions. To “own land” usually means to have the right to till (or not to till) the soil, to mine the soil, to offer those rights for sale, etc., but not to have the right to throw soil at a passerby, to use it to change the course of a stream, or to force someone to buy it. What are owned are socially recognized rights of action. (Emphasis added).

Literally, everything we own comes with a range of limitations on our use rights. Literally. Everything. So starting from a position that limitations on use mean something is not, in fact, owned, is absurd.

Moreover, in defining what we buy when we buy digital goods by reference to analog goods, P&H are comparing apples and oranges, without acknowledging that both apples and oranges are bought.

There has been a fair amount of discussion about the nature of digital content transactions (including by the USPTO and NTIA), and whether they are analogous to traditional sales of objects or more properly characterized as licenses. But this is largely a distinction without a difference, and the nature of the transaction is unnecessary in understanding that P&H’s assertion of deception is unwarranted.

Quite simply, we are accustomed to buying licenses as well as products. Whenever we buy a ticket — e.g., an airline ticket or a ticket to the movies — we are buying the right to use something or gain some temporary privilege. These transactions are governed by the terms of the license. But we certainly buy tickets, no? Alchian and Demsetz again:

The domain of demarcated uses of a resource can be partitioned among several people. More than one party can claim some ownership interest in the same resource. One party may own the right to till the land, while another, perhaps the state, may own an easement to traverse or otherwise use the land for specific purposes. It is not the resource itself which is owned; it is a bundle, or a portion, of rights to use a resource that is owned. In its original meaning, property referred solely to a right, title, or interest, and resources could not be identified as property any more than they could be identified as right, title, or interest. (Emphasis added).

P&H essentially assert that restrictions on the use of property are so inconsistent with the notion of property that it would be deceptive to describe the acquisition transaction as a purchase. But such a claim completely overlooks the fact that there are restrictions on any use of property in general, and on ownership of copies of copyright-protected materials in particular.

Take analog copies of copyright-protected works. While the lawful owner of a copy is able to lend that copy to a friend, sell it, or even use it as a hammer or paperweight, he or she can not offer it for rental (for certain kinds of works), cannot reproduce it, may not publicly perform or broadcast it, and may not use it to bludgeon a neighbor. In short, there are all kinds of restrictions on the use of said object — yet P&H have little problem with defining the relationship of person to object as “ownership.”

Consumers’ understanding of all the terms of exchange is a poor metric for determining the nature of property interests

P&H make much of the assertion that most users don’t “know” the precise terms that govern the allocation of rights in digital copies; this is the source of the “deception” they assert. But there is a cost to marking out the precise terms of use with perfect specificity (no contract specifies every eventuality), a cost to knowing the terms perfectly, and a cost to caring about them.

When we buy digital goods, we probably care a great deal about a few terms. For a digital music file, for example, we care first and foremost about whether it will play on our device(s). Other terms are of diminishing importance. Users certainly care whether they can play a song when offline, for example, but whether their children will be able to play it after they die? Not so much. That eventuality may, in fact, be specified in the license, but the nature of this particular ownership relationship includes a degree of rational ignorance on the users’ part: The typical consumer simply doesn’t care. In other words, she is, in Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon’s term, “boundedly rational.” That isn’t deception; it’s a feature of life without which we would be overwhelmed by “information overload” and unable to operate. We have every incentive and ability to know the terms we care most about, and to ignore the ones about which we care little.

Relatedly, P&H also fail to understand the relationship between price and ownership. A digital song that is purchased from Amazon for $.99 comes with a set of potentially valuable attributes. For example:

  • It may be purchased on its own, without the other contents of an album;
  • It never degrades in quality, and it’s extremely difficult to misplace;
  • It may be purchased from one’s living room and be instantaneously available;
  • It can be easily copied or transferred onto multiple devices; and
  • It can be stored in Amazon’s cloud without taking up any of the consumer’s physical memory resources.

In many ways that matter to consumers, digital copies are superior to analog or physical ones. And yet, compared to physical media, on a per-song basis (assuming one could even purchase a physical copy of a single song without purchasing an entire album), $.99 may represent a considerable discount. Moreover, in 1982 when CDs were first released, they cost an average of $15. In 2017 dollars, that would be $38. Yet today most digital album downloads can be found for $10 or less.

Of course, songs purchased on CD or vinyl offer other benefits that a digital copy can’t provide. But the main thing — the ability to listen to the music — is approximately equal, and yet the digital copy offers greater convenience at (often) lower price. It is impossible to conclude that a consumer is duped by such a purchase, even if it doesn’t come with the ability to resell the song.

In fact, given the price-to-value ratio, it is perhaps reasonable to think that consumers know full well (or at least suspect) that there might be some corresponding limitations on use — the inability to resell, for example — that would explain the discount. For some people, those limitations might matter, and those people, presumably, figure out whether such limitations are present before buying a digital album or song For everyone else, however, the ability to buy a digital song for $.99 — including all of the benefits of digital ownership, but minus the ability to resell — is a good deal, just as it is worth it to a home buyer to purchase a house, regardless of whether it is subject to various easements.

Consumers are, in fact, familiar with “buying” property with all sorts of restrictions

The inability to resell digital goods looms inordinately large for P&H: According to them, by virtue of the fact that digital copies may not be resold, “ownership” is no longer an appropriate characterization of the relationship between the consumer and her digital copy. P&H believe that digital copies of works are sufficiently similar to analog versions, that traditional doctrines of exhaustion (which would permit a lawful owner of a copy of a work to dispose of that copy as he or she deems appropriate) should apply equally to digital copies, and thus that the inability to alienate the copy as the consumer wants means that there is no ownership interest per se.

But, as discussed above, even ownership of a physical copy doesn’t convey to the purchaser the right to make or allow any use of that copy. So why should we treat the ability to alienate a copy as the determining factor in whether it is appropriate to refer to the acquisition as a purchase? P&H arrive at this conclusion only through the illogical assertion that

Consumers operate in the marketplace based on their prior experience. We suggest that consumers’ “default” behavior is based on the experiences of buying physical media, and the assumptions from that context have carried over into the digital domain.

P&H want us to believe that consumers can’t distinguish between the physical and virtual worlds, and that their ability to use media doesn’t differentiate between these realms. But consumers do understand (to the extent that they care) that they are buying a different product, with different attributes. Does anyone try to play a vinyl record on his or her phone? There are perceived advantages and disadvantages to different kinds of media purchases. The ability to resell is only one of these — and for many (most?) consumers not likely the most important.

And, furthermore, the notion that consumers better understood their rights — and the limitations on ownership — in the physical world and that they carried these well-informed expectations into the digital realm is fantasy. Are we to believe that the consumers of yore understood that when they bought a physical record they could sell it, but not rent it out? That if they played that record in a public place they would need to pay performance royalties to the songwriter and publisher? Not likely.

Simply put, there is a wide variety of goods and services that we clearly buy, but that have all kinds of attributes that do not fit P&H’s crabbed definition of ownership. For example:

  • We buy tickets to events and membership in clubs (which, depending upon club rules, may not be alienated, and which always lapse for non-payment).
  • We buy houses notwithstanding the fact that in most cases all we own is the right to inhabit the premises for as long as we pay the bank (which actually retains more of the incidents of “ownership”).
  • In fact, we buy real property encumbered by a series of restrictive covenants: Depending upon where we live, we may not be able to build above a certain height, we may not paint the house certain colors, we may not be able to leave certain objects in the driveway, and we may not be able to resell without approval of a board.

We may or may not know (or care) about all of the restrictions on our use of such property. But surely we may accurately say that we bought the property and that we “own” it, nonetheless.

The reality is that we are comfortable with the notion of buying any number of limited property interests — including the purchasing of a license — regardless of the contours of the purchase agreement. The fact that some ownership interests may properly be understood as licenses rather than as some form of exclusive and permanent dominion doesn’t suggest that a consumer is not involved in a transaction properly characterized as a sale, or that a consumer is somehow deceived when the transaction is characterized as a sale — and P&H are surely aware of this.

Conclusion: The real issue for P&H is “digital first sale,” not deception

At root, P&H are not truly concerned about consumer deception; they are concerned about what they view as unreasonable constraints on the “rights” of consumers imposed by copyright law in the digital realm. Resale looms so large in their analysis not because consumers care about it (or are deceived about it), but because the real object of their enmity is the lack of a “digital first sale doctrine” that exactly mirrors the law regarding physical goods.

But Congress has already determined that there are sufficient distinctions between ownership of digital copies and ownership of analog ones to justify treating them differently, notwithstanding ownership of the particular copy. And for good reason: Trade in “used” digital copies is not a secondary market. Such copies are identical to those traded in the primary market and would compete directly with “pristine” digital copies. It makes perfect sense to treat ownership differently in these cases — and still to say that both digital and analog copies are “bought” and “owned.”

P&H’s deep-seated opposition to current law colors and infects their analysis — and, arguably, their failure to be upfront about it is the real deception. When one starts an analysis with an already-identified conclusion, the path from hypothesis to result is unlikely to withstand scrutiny, and that is certainly the case here.

In Amazon, Apple, Copyright, Intellectual Property, Law & Economics, Platforms , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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