imperfect markets – Escondido Framework

My grandmother’s oranges and Frank Hester’s rants

My grandmother lived through two world wars and difficult times. She kept her politics, other than a general sense of fairness and distaste for injustice, close to herself. I remember it came as a surprise to me when she announced that she made her selection of fresh fruit (oranges if I recall) on the basis that they shouldn’t come from a nation with a pretty toxic regime and social system. Only a few years later, after discovering marketing during my Stanford MBA, I realised that it should not have been a surprise. It is an essential component of the Escondido Framework that our choices are informed by a wide range of considerations and trade-offs, albeit some may swamp others in their importance, and this affects what we buy.

I recently introduced an old friend who is researching impact investing by charity trustees to a former colleague who is chief executive of one of the largest group of family charitable trusts in the UK. The old friend is interested in the use of charity endowment to make mission-aligned investments rather than purely for financial yield. The former colleagues recounted how, as custody of the inherited wealth that the family invests in charitable giving passes from generation to generation, not only does the direction of the charitable giving shift, but also the attitude of the family members towards the non-financial impact of their investment decisions changes. This should be no surprise either, as impact investment strategies are only a short step beyond avoiding investing in industries that conflict with your charitable purposes (for example, as chair of the finance committee of Versus Arthritis, I had no hesitation in making the case that a health charity should avoid investing in industries like tobacco and alcohol whose businesses contributed to ill-health).

TPP’s Frank Hester

So what do I feel about the use by my family doctor (in common with all the GPs in west London and a large part of the NHS community services locally) using SystmOne, one of the most widely deployed electronic patient record systems in the UK? Most of my fellow patients have no idea that TPP (The Phoenix Partnership), which developed and operated SystmOne, was founded and apparently remains owned exclusively by Frank Hester. It was Frank Hester, the largest single donor to the Conservative Party, who has been alleged recently to have declared a few years ago at a company gathering that looking at Diane Abbott makes you “want to hate all black women” and that she “should be shot”. I don’t often have sympathy with Diane[1] who has very different political views to mine and has said some pretty daft and sometimes unpleasant things in the past. Comments of this type are unacceptable for many reasons and it reflects very badly on the company and its people that he felt able to make them.

I imagine that I will be holding my nose metaphorically when I next sit down in my GP’s consulting room as he or she updates my patient record with the details of my visit. If I was still chair at West London NHS Trust, where we were in the process of replacing a legacy electronic patient record system with SystmOne to provide for better interoperability with that used by our primary care partners, I doubt whether the knowledge that SystmOne was provided by a company headed up by someone with such views and that the profits were adding to his wealth would have changed my view of our IT strategy. Notwithstanding Mr Hester’s unpleasant views, the system produced by his company is the only one in town, or at least in my bit of London.

Whether things might have been different many years ago when TPP was starting out is moot. I imagine that Mr Hester was more cautious about what he said, how he said it and in whose hearing he said it, even in as recently as 1997. Certainly, I don’t recall being any less sensitive to boorish, racist and sexist language then, or my NHS colleagues being any less easily offended. But a generation on, and with the money in the bank and the software widely adopted, the customer (and ultimately their patients) has far less choice. Reflecting on this episode in Escondido Framework terms, the shape of the market interfaces have changed. How Frank Hester behaves, which has a bearing on how he does business, has almost certainly changed. Given the strength of his product with its customers and its established position against its competitors, he can (despite the widespread negative reaction his comments received) say unpleasant things without it affecting his business. For those of us who metaphorically are holding our noses, we have fewer degrees of freedom in our decision taking than we might have had many years ago if presented with a prospective supplier who acted in such a way (rather than exercising the restraint that was probably the case when Frank Hester was starting out with TPP in the late nineties).

[1] ……although I am entertained by the memory of serving with her as a fellow member of the Joint Academic Committee in the History Faculty at Cambridge University in 1974, when she (it can have been nobody else) described me in a student newspaper as “rather too obviously a Cambridge politician on the make” – wonderfully ironic given that she became the career politician whereas I made my escape from politics in the 1980s.

Markets, State and People by Diane Coyle

Rousseau observed that “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains”. Many people in business, politics and media talk about markets in a similar way, as though “free markets” are the natural state and desirable order and any intervention by an agency of the state or collective popular action is represents an undesirable fettering of enterprise.

Economists since Adam Smith have recognised that markets can fail and may need to be subject to intervention. Even figures as inspiring to simplistic supporters of free markets as Milton Friedman recognise that there are proper roles for the state where markets fail.

Diane Coyle starts in much the same place as other economists who look at limits of markets and the place of government intervention in markets. She starts with conventional analysis of market failures, listing seven instances of failure in the conditions required for free markets to be efficient. She returns these seven types of failure throughout her examination of the relationship between markets, the state and people, and description of the appropriateness of state intervention or collective action to address.

In cataloguing the failures and the responses to them, Coyle assists the reader, from the economics or politics undergraduate or MBA student getting their first exposure to welfare economics and public policy, through to the general reader seeking a better understanding of how the world works. She draws on and explains clearly the work of people like Coase, Ostrom and Thaler who have broadened and deepened our understanding of how people both cause and respond to the seven types of failure she describes. The book is furthered enriched, and the lessons consequently rendered more accessible, by a peppering of case studies illustrating the core arguments.

Coyle also tackles government failure, highlighting the shortcomings in bureaucracies (or among public servants) and as a consequence of political failures (or failures of politicians) that result in the application of the wrong policies to address the market failures. The text seems to peter out in the final chapter where she addresses what she appears to hope is the solution to the problems of government failure, which is the application of evidence to economic policy. In this chapter that she reveals the limitations of her experience as a career academic and regulator, with a rather slight addressing of the use of statistics and cost benefit analysis. This doesn’t detract from the power (or readability) of the previous nine chapters, but point to the opportunity for someone else to write something of similar tone and quality to fill the gap on how to test public policy initiatives to address market failure.

A new way of looking at the firm

The Escondido Framework starts from the assumption that the company (in common with many other forms of organisation) is defined by its interfaces with the various market places in which it operates, in the simplest form the markets for labour, raw materials, capital and finished goods or services. These are, in effect, its boundaries. And while there are differences between markets, in essence they all reflect an exchange between two parties for mutual benefit – the employee receives payment and other non-financial rewards for his labour; the supplier of raw materials payment for the goods provided; the supplier of funds either interest or dividends and the prospect of capital growth for forgoing use of those funds for his own short term benefit; and the customer goods or services in exchange for payment. The Framework also reflects the view that being a party to the exchange does not of itself mean that the other party has a “stake” in the company or “own” it in any absolute sense. There may be a contractual relationship between the party and the company which reflects the terms of the exchange and provides structure for enforcement but essentially this is a mutually beneficial relationship in which both parties have duties to deliver their side of the bargain.

Within the Framework, there is no assumption that any of the providers to the company – of labour, raw materials, capital or revenue – any superior rights or claims over the company, in traditional parlance, “ownership”. Legal devices may be put in place by the state, or may exist in the form of contractual agreements that provide these other parties with rights, for example: in the form of wages and employment rights; to payment for goods at a particular point in time; to payment of interest or dividends; and to return of capital under prescribed terms and with differing degrees of confidence. The contracts and legal frameworks may also define mechanisms under which these other parties may enforce these rights, but enforcement is also be a function of other considerations that reflect market conditions rather than the law, for example: what alternatives are available to a workforce with a specific set of skills and ties to a particular geography; what other customers are available for the raw materials, and how much are they willing to pay; what will other prospective providers of capital pay for these shares or bonds, and how easily can we replace the existing board and executive team; and how often do customers in consumer markets consider, let alone read terms and conditions.

The Framework suggests that the company can be considered as a “virtual space”, existing between these market interfaces. The location and shape of each of the market interfaces reflects what economists think of as the demand function and marketing academics describe as indifference curves, i.e. how customers make trade-offs between the various attributes of a product. These are also shaped by the competition that the company faces: when recruiting from a limited pool of skilled employees; for sourcing scarce raw materials; seeking funding from a limited capital market, or seeking the custom of consumers who can buy from other companies or who may be able to substitute one item for other goods. Remove the competition and the market interface or boundary moves outwards, increasing the volume of the “virtual space” available to the company. Improve the operating efficiency within the company or secure a competitive advantage over other participants in one of the markets concerned and the volume of the “virtual space” will also increase.

At any particular point in time, for any particular product or service it sells, these interfaces will be brought together, or resolved, at a single virtual point at which of each of the providers is rewarded at prices that are, all things considered, satisfactory to them. In perfect market equilibrium, all prices would be at market clearing levels, no-one would realise economic rents, and there would one point at which the interfaces would be resolved. No self-respecting economist has ever viewed the perfect market paradigm as anything other than a useful benchmark for understanding a world which is dynamic and virtually always distant from the paradigm, and in this the Escondido Framework is no different. In reality, the “virtual space” is just that, an available set of points at which the price levels may be resolved. Depending on the scale of the external market failures that allow for the internal organisation of economic activity to generate greater efficiency, there is potential for the management of the company to elect where to set prices and where on the indifference curves to locate the marketing proposition to each of the other parties (suppliers or labour, raw material, capital and custom), and how to allocate the economic surplus that the absolute volume of the “virtual space” represents.