Law Commons^™

The Future Of Direct Finance: The Diverging Paths Of Peer-To-Peer Lending And Kickstarter, Kathryn Judge

Faculty Scholarship

For centuries, the trend has been toward longer and more complex intermediation chains in a wide array of contexts. The growing length and complexity of intermediation chains were both the by-products and drivers of ever-greater globalization and specialization. In recent years, however, there has been a shift in the opposite direction. In a variety of markets, suppliers and consumers increasingly transact directly with one another. Many of these developments have arisen from technological innovations that reduce search costs and other hurdles to transacting, like verifying information and negotiating the terms of a transaction. Airbnb, Etsy, and their kin, for example, …