LPJ has a post up comparing Kickstarter to Venture Capital. I think he is onto something there, but I think it also goes in another direction (as I indicated in his comments section).
I think Kickstarter is emerging as the best way to overpay for goods.
Overpaying is a kind of charitable act. You are paying in excess of market value because you want the producer of that material to be able to produce more of it. This is because you feel that normal payments may not be enough to keep the producer in business, so you pay more for the opportunity to buy more.
You are probably overpaying for stuff right now by force. When I was at university, I had to pay huge fees for facilities I never used. If they charged usage fees for those facilities, too few people would use them to support the facility. But the university wanted it, so they forced everyone to pay. You could apply this same logic to a huge range of public goods provided by government.
However, forced interactions leave people bitter. Charitable ones do the opposite.
I see Kickstarter emerging as a vehicle for this. You can overpay and feel good about it. You can feel like you are keeping someone in business who might otherwise have no chance to produce. You are helping to 'fix' the market. You are buying extra supply to make up for the lack of demand in the marketplace.
I think some of the talk in the OSR community about high pricing may also feed into this way of thinking. You are overpaying for some OSR product, hoping to get more offerings to buy in the future.
What do you think?
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