个人对个人(P2P)市场曾经很简单：最初只有一个eBay。如果你想卖掉一支坏了的激光笔，在eBay能找到买家。接下来有了本地交易网站Craigslist，不久之后，P2P平台把所有你能想到的市场中的买卖双方都联系在了一起：手工艺品(Etsy)；零工(TaskRabbit)；交通(Uber)；住宿(Airbnb)；消费贷款(Zopa)；甚至酒类(Drizly)。
当你意识到自己真的能在周六晚上的旧金山坐车回家、或是出租阁楼赚些钱时，你会兴奋一段时间，但是反对情绪一直在发酵，其中夹杂着两层抱怨，在一年前亚特兰大出租车公司和司机起诉Uber一案中被很好地展现了出来。
“Uber在亚特兰大的运营几乎毫不考虑乘客的安全问题，也从未顾及保护乘客的法律，”一名原告在《亚特兰大宪法日报》(Atlanta Journal-Constitution)上发表声明称，“自Uber开始运营以来，我们的收入节节下滑，拥有合法执照的出租车司机正在离开这个行业。”
换句话说，Uber等P2P服务被称为危险服务，而且给现有从业者带来了不受欢迎的竞争。（一些研究支持这个常识性结论：新竞争者威胁到了现有从业者的收入。）
这两点或许貌似截然不同的问题。你在Airbnb上出租一个单间时担心消防通道指示是一回事，而保护当地正规酒店经营者的利润空间是另外一回事。
不过，这两个问题不可避免地被搅在一起，因为它们都触及了现有从业者受到监管的方式。人们希望监管机构通过让醉酒者和性侵者难以当专车司机、易失火建筑不能接待毫无戒心的游客、以及雇主无法剥削工人，来保护消费者、雇员以及公众的利益。但是，一些法规似乎更倾向于保护局内人，而不是消费者。
想想纽约出租车牌照制度：在没有牌照的情况下你不能开出租车，出租车牌照不时成为数百万美元的资产，往往归投资者所有，由其以每天100美元或更高的价格把牌照租给司机。菜鸟Uber和Lyft不止争夺乘客，它们还争抢司机。相比向牌照所有者交份儿钱，司机或许更倾向于把佣金交给这些新老板。
出租车牌照成为稀缺资产，纯粹是由监管者的一纸文书造成的。在这种情况下，即使不是狂热的自由主义者，你也能看出监管者的动机是保护这些资产的价值。再说，不只是自由市场原教旨主义者才会相信：如果消费者认为出租车提供的服务更安全，他们会花钱购买更安全的服务。
这或许有助于从不同角度来探究这场辩论。这些新竞争者是否提供了有价值的新服务，还是只是利用技术规避了其他人必须支付的税款以此套利、从其他竞争者必须跳过去的监管障碍下面钻了过去？
如果它们有实实在在的经济价值，那么就该由监管者琢磨出如何释放价值，而不是试图通过立法去消灭它。
丽兰褠纳夫(Liran Einav)、基娅拉法罗纳托(Chiara Farronato)和乔纳森莱文(Jonathan Levin) 3位经济学家对P2P市场进行的新研究发现，其经济价值确实存在。P2P市场让两件过去难以想象的事情成为可能。
第一，它令贫瘠的市场变得富饶而肥沃。eBay就是一个典型的例子，它使得离奇产品的买卖双方找到彼此并从交易中受益。Etsy和eBay的模式一样，你可以在这里找到出售像肢解的青蛙一样的毛绒玩具（似乎不太可能在商业街找到立足之地的产品）的卖家。
P2P第二个妙招是将兼职者引入该市场以满足需求激增时的情况。只是为了应对暑假旺季就建设新酒店，或是为了解决新年夜的打车高峰而增加出租车——那是效率低下的；但是，只要有需求，P2P市场就可以引入一些额外的供应。结果就是，周五晚上11点在P2P平台更容易叫到车，学校假期时P2P提供的客房价格更合理。
P2P市场非常值得拥有。因此，监管者面临的挑战是赶上其发展的脚步。应该如何把Airbnb上每年只把房间出租10晚的房东与长期经营住宿加早餐旅店(B&B)的房东放在同一个监管层面上？Uber专车司机是公司雇员（就像加州劳工委员会最近裁决的那样），还是利用Uber软件工作的自由职业者（像Uber主张的那样）？或是其他性质？
詹姆斯苏洛维尔奇(James Surowiecki)最近在《纽约客》(New Yorker)的专栏认为是这属于“其他性质”，呼吁进行监管改革给“零工经济的工作者提供一个更好地兼顾灵活性和安全性的办法”。这听起来像是一个令人向往的目标，尽管实现它并没有那么简单。为Uber司机或是TaskRabbit的“任务方”提供养老金、带薪休假或是失业保险，将需要明智的法规和明智的管理体系。
P2P市场或许曾经很简单；但如今它关系到的远远不只是偶尔有一支坏掉的激光笔。（中国进出口网）
Peer-to-peer markets used to be simple: there was eBay. If you had a broken laser pointer you wanted to sell, eBay was the place to find a buyer. Then came the local marketplace Craigslist and, before long, peer-to-peer markets were linking buyers and sellers in every market imaginable: crafts (Etsy); chores (TaskRabbit); transport (Uber); accommodation (Airbnb); consumer loans (Zopa); and even booze (Drizly).
It was exciting, for a while, to realise that you could actually get a car home on a Saturday night in San Francisco, or make money renting out your attic, but the backlash has been simmering for some time. That backlash mixes two complaints, elegantly exemplified when a group of taxicab owners and drivers sued Uber in Atlanta a year ago.
“Uber has been operating in Atlanta with little concern about the safety of their passengers and zero concern for the laws that protect them,” said one of the plaintiffs in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Our incomes have steadily dropped since Uber started and legally licensed drivers are leaving the business.”
In other words, peer-to-peer services such as Uber are said to be hazardous, and they are also unwelcome competition for incumbents. (Several studies have supported the common-sense conclusion that these new competitors threaten the revenue of existing players.)
These might seem very different issues. It’s one thing to worry about signposting fire exits when you let out a spare room on Airbnb. Protecting the profit margins of fine upstanding local hoteliers is another matter.
Yet the two questions are inevitably tangled up, because both touch on the way incumbents are regulated. One would hope that regulators protect consumers, employees and the public by making it more difficult for drunks and sexual predators to drive cars, for firetraps to host unsuspecting tourists, and for employers to exploit workers. But some regulations seem designed more to protect insiders than to protect consumers.
Consider the New York taxi medallion system: you can’t drive a taxicab without one, and they’ve been million-dollar assets at times, often owned by investors and leased to drivers at a rate of $100 or more a day. New kids Uber and Lyft not only compete for passengers, they compete for drivers too, who may prefer to pay commission to these new players than the flat fee to the medallion owner.
Taxi medallions are a scarce asset created purely by a stroke of the regulator’s pen, and you don’t need to be a hardcore libertarian to conclude that, in this case, the regulator is motivated by protecting the value of this asset. Nor does it take a free-market fundamentalist to believe that if consumers think that taxicabs provide a safer service, they will pay for that safer service.
It may help to approach the debate from a different direction. Are these new players providing a valuable new service or are they merely an arbitrage play, using technology to sidestep taxes that others must pay, and to limbo-dance under regulatory hurdles that rivals must jump?
If the economic value is real, then it is up to the regulators to figure out how to unleash that value rather than trying to legislate it out of existence.
A new study of peer-to-peer markets by economists Liran Einav, Chiara Farronato and Jonathan Levin argues that the economic value is there all right. Peer-to-peer markets make two things possible that were previously hard to imagine.
The first is to make arid markets lush and fertile. The quintessential example is eBay, enabling buyers and sellers of the quirkiest products to find each other and gain by trading. Etsy fits the eBay mould, with sellers who will knit you a cuddly toy designed to resemble a dissected frog, a product that seems unlikely to find a niche on the high street.
The second peer-to-peer trick is to introduce part-timers into the market to meet surges in demand. It’s inefficient to build hotels just to cope with the summer rush, or taxis to cope with New Year’s Eve but, if the demand is there, peer-to-peer markets can pull in a bit of extra supply. As a result, it should be easier to get a cab at 11pm on a Friday, and prices for hotel rooms should be more reasonable during school holidays.
Peer-to-peer markets are well worth havin. The challenge for regulators, then, is to catch up. How should Airbnb landlords who let a room for 10 nights a year be placed on a level playing field with regular bed-and-breakfast landlords? Are Uber drivers employees (as a California labour commissioner recently ruled)? Or freelancers using Uber’s software to help them do their jobs (as Uber insists)? Or something else?
James Surowiecki, writing in The New Yorker, recently argued for “something else”, and called for a regulatory overhaul to give “gig-economy workers a better balance of flexibility and security”. That sounds like an admirable aim, although achieving it isn’t straightforward. Giving pensions, vacation rights or unemployment insurance to Uber drivers or TaskRabbit “taskers” would require both clever rules and clever admin systems.
Peer-to-peer markets may once have been simple; now there is more at stake than the occasional broken laser pointer.
