Reciprocity as a Business Model

you could think of a tipping business model as a call option on human nature. People who are bullish on business models like this are bullish on the underlying asset class—humanity. Skeptics, on the other hand, are humanity bears. 

Many indigenous communities operated on the principle of reciprocal gift giving. Say you were a baker who needed another pair of shoes; you wouldn’t go to the shoemaker and offer some flour for a pair of shoes. Rather, you might drop a hint to the shoemaker’s wife at some point that your current shoes were falling apart and hope she’d say “Oh you p... See more

ifferent versions of the same history give rise to different interpretations of human beings and how they transact with each other. The version of barter leads to one set of assumptions about rational, mechanistic and utility-seeking behavior, while the version of ancient obligations leads to another set of assumptions about complex, multifaceted a... See more

The principle here is reciprocity, but notice that it is not simultaneous. Unlike the notion of barter, time is allowed to elapse before one deed is repaid by another. Trust is required to bridge that gap. Unlike barter, the exchange is not mechanistic in that it does not place a concrete value on one deed versus another. Rather it is inherently pe... See more

This brings us back to Earnin and Public. These optional payment models, what you might call business models of reciprocity, also operate like communities. They are implemented in software and so do not have the same sense of physical, local community, but community is still the underlying value system.

When a user decides to take out a cash advance on Earnin, they select an amount to borrow and then see a prompt with a range of amounts they might choose to tip. Each suggested tip amount is contextualized in terms of how many other users it would help by covering the transaction cost of their respective loans. This makes the motivation for tipping... See more

Caroline Humphrey, of Cambridge University, concludes in her definitive anthropological work on barter that “no example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests there has never been such a thing.”