MIT/Harvard Paper's 'Coasean Singularity': AI Agents Dissolving the Friction That Holds the Economy Together
wschroll · x · 2026-09-07
Citing a joint MIT/Harvard paper titled "The Coasean Singularity," the author argues AI agents could destabilize the corporate economy.
- Coase's 1937 theory: firms exist because transaction costs—finding prices, negotiating contracts, verifying identities, managing logistics—make outsourcing every task impractical.
- The paper argues autonomous agents that can search, negotiate, verify, and execute will dissolve that friction, undermining the rationale for corporations.
- Author's takeaway: a century of organizing the global economy around corporations to manage human limits relied on friction for stability—and we just dissolved it.
An opinion thread translating academic work into a big-picture narrative on agents reshaping economic structure.
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