ABSTRACT
This chapter applies the idea of alertness to mobile commerce. The term alertness describes how individual agents in market processes perceive imperfections of these processes and build a business model addressing and solving these imperfections. In mobile commerce, most innovation comes out of entrepreneurial alertness. But many novelties also come from the alertness of the customers that use feedback loops and arbitrage to solve what they perceive as imperfections. Since mobile commerce relies heavily on these decentralized, undetermined dynamics of alertness, mobile commerce—despite all of its technical, logistical, and operational novelties—follows the typical economic logic of innovation as spontaneous order.
