Time Arbitrage as a Contestable Market

One potential advantage of time arbitrage, is that knowledge would be experienced and applied in non rival context. Non rival use reduces market frictions and encourages a fuller, more diverse range of group skills capacity. Imagine the process as a concentrated and decentralized community setting, for productive agglomeration. When knowledge use is non rival, there's fewer cost burdens of entry and exit for all concerned. Likewise, the resulting continuum for mutually obtained skills coordination, promotes market competition for the many - not just the few. Exchange velocity increases, since knowledge application is less likely to bottleneck or be treated as absolute and exclusive of interpretation.

Given the reality of time scarcity, we don't always have the economic time value at our disposal, to reimburse what others may deem the economic value of their own exclusive skills arbitrage. Nor do governments always have the budgets to completely reimburse skills arbitrage for given groups beyond a certain point - which in turn limits both the production and consumption potential of valuable knowledge and skill. Consequently, the extent of marketplace vitality which is possible for time based services, depends on how many actually take part. How much aggregate participation is presently lost, due partly to extreme variation in skill value which is further compounded by present day accreditation processes?

What's more, the reality of time scarcity, prevents (standard) economies of scale when human capital investment (mostly) accrues to time based product. Fortunately, time value unit symmetry would allow scaling up through added participation. Here's how Economics Online describes contestable markets:

The theory of contestable markets is associated with the American economist William Baumol. In essence, a contestable market is one with zero entry and exit costs. This means there are no barriers to entry, such as sunk costs and contractual agreements. For a market to be perfectly contestable, relevant industry technology would be readily available to potential entrants.

The existence, or absence, of sunk costs and economies of scale are the two most important determinants of contestability. On the basis of these two criteria, natural monopolies are the least contestable markets.

Nevertheless, no market can be completely competitive in its entirety. As William Baumol explains:

In our analysis, perfect contestability...serves not primarily as a description of reality, but as a benchmark for desirable industrialization which is far more flexible and is applicable far more widely than the one that was available to us before.

While Baumol's focus in this (early eighties) instance was industrialization and tradable sector activity, contestable markets as concept, could also be useful for the market potential of non tradable sector activity. In particular, for high skill time based product, a contestable market would be one in which knowledge could be utilized as freely as possible.

To this end, time arbitrage could eventually help reverse the trajectory of excess rival knowledge costs which are now lodged in rising government debt loads. And interestingly enough, while Baumol's disease tends to be associated with non tradable services income in geographic correlation with tradable sector income, non rival knowledge use could lessen the chronic severity of this "condition" in a macroeconomic capacity - given its unfortunate contribution to sectoral imbalance.

In recent decades, numerous opportunities have surfaced which could help reverse the costs of human capital investment. What's more: Of late, these possibilities have greatly increased, and AI deep learning could make it possible for the average citizen to work alongside AI in a "just in time" knowledge production capacity. Will the reality of today's growing debt burdens finally encourage societies to remove constraints of human capital investment when they are no longer necessary? How many sunk costs for today's high skill services, are actually self imposed? After all, it wasn't so long ago, that healthcare mostly functioned as an open, dynamic, highly contestable market - one with minimal entry and exit costs.