Hi Everyone,
I've been a steem user for a while, but only now getting into writing content. A bit about myself: I'm Dr. Roee Sarel, an academic researcher of Law&Economics and a co-founder of Blocksource. I study incentive structures and institutions, with a focus on courts, crime, and pro-social behavior. While engaging in the world of startups and blockchain, I became fascinated with the economic idea behind Smart Media Tokens. The idea of an decentralized economy which distributes financial rewards for content curation and evaluation has many real-world implications, and in particular holds two economic advantages for both ex-ante and ex-post creations. Ex-ante, receiving any financial reward for creating content provides an incentive for improving the contents' quality. This occurs especially where creator compete with one another for the attention of content curators, leading to a free market of ideas with a clear supply and demand functions. Moreover, receiving financial rewards for the curation of content may prove especially meaningful, if rewards are structures in an incentive compatible way, i.e. if truth-telling is achieved. Of course, this must be done carefully, as otherwise people may herd and join evaluations of others for financial reasons (i.e. when someone rides the wave of popularity instead of expressing individual opinions).
Ex-post, it seems fair to reward good content - we as a society like giving prizes and granting medals not only because they encourage people to work hard to get them, but also because saying "thank you" and expressing appreciation is part of our human nature.
In any case, my startup, @Blocksource, leverages this economic rationale to create a market for information on the activity of startups. I have a lot to say on this, of course, but this is better relegated to its own post.
Nice to meet you all and I look forward to connect!