Increasing complexity in the ‘new’ economy and coordination requirements beyond the ‘market’: blockages and lock-ins as social costs, and a new governance to mitigate them

The characteristics of the ‘new’ economy are not evidenced so much by the hypermania of high-tech stock markets – which have turned out, with their recent deflations, to be rather conventional. They are evidenced by the more deregulated, clustered, digitized and net-based character of the real economy. This change in character entails a considerable intensification of direct interdependencies among economic agents, where the outcome of A directly depends also on the behaviour of B and vice versa. This has always been the case in real economies because they are socio-economies. It has been anticipated by institutionalists and other socioeconomists, but it has become so intense, obvious and ubiquitous that it can no longer be ignored by mainstream economic theorists and real-world policy makers as well.