Proposes multiple games and social network markets as promising concepts to understand consumer co-creation.

27
“Social network markets […] are the developmental stage of what may eventually become a mature market. These are markets because exchange occurs, but it is social connections and recommendations, access and attention that performs the coordinating function, not price. Strategies, business models and institutions that work in mature markets do not necessarily work in social network markets.”

28
“Consumer co-creation is thus not a context of ‘social and participatory cultures’ on the one side, and ‘the market and its individual rationality’ on the other. Rather, social network markets simultaneously engage both domains of motivations and coordinating institutions. Consumer co-creation occurs in this co-evolutionary ‘space’. Yet this is a continually transforming space of new cultural practices, new business models and other institutions that govern and regulate these exchanges. These are still emerging and developing, aligning uneasily and sometimes abrasively with existing industrial media era institutions.”

29
“Complex motivations do not necessarily lead to complex actions. […] This suggests more attention to how identities, communities and business models associated with consumer co-creation adapt and change, rather than how they dominate or prevail.”

“Economic forces are not necessarily in opposition to cultural forces, but rather both continually accommodate and adapt to each other. Economic systems co-evolve with cultural systems (and with technological systems and political systems, etc).”

“There are always implicit contracts involved in consumer co-creation, even when not made explicit, and failure to recognize and respect these contracts was central to what went wrong at Auran. […] Any attempt to unpack these into purely communitarian ‘gift’ motivations or veiled pecuniary motivations is unlikely to succeed. Instead, models of consumer participation in production and innovation will need to develop more integrated models of human action and institutional co-evolution.”