CONCEPT
The Guild Model (AI Economy)
The organizational form that Coase's framework predicts for the AI economy: a community of AI-augmented independent practitioners that provides the quality assurance, tacit knowledge transmission, professional standards, and belonging that markets cannot supply, without the coordination overhead of the hierarchical firm.
When
Ronald Coase's framework is applied to an economy where individual producers can match the output of small firms, a prediction emerges that the current moment is beginning to validate: the revival of the guild as an organizational form. Medieval guilds were communities of practitioners organized around a shared craft—providing training through apprenticeship, maintaining quality standards through peer review, offering social belonging through membership, and regulating entry to the profession through credentialing. The guild did not employ its members; members were independent producers who operated on the market, selling their services to customers. The guild's function was not production but the maintenance of the conditions—skills, standards, trust, identity—under which production could occur at a reliable level of quality. When AI enables individual producers to create at the level that previously required firms, the Coasian question becomes: who provides the functions that markets have never been able to supply—the transmission of
tacit