The Consumerium Exchange

The Consumerium Exchange is where people can voice their opinion on which disputed article or campaign is closest to the truth at a certain period of time.

The purpose of The Consumerium Exchange is to provide an popularity measurement for different opinions, which determines the default opinion shown to the consumer on each issue. This does not necessarily determine whether the "red light" or "green light" goes off. In fact only those cases where a "yellow light" (caution) goes off, should really require anyone to read anything.

The consumer can override the view of a given company, product or industry with her/his own preferences automatically or manually. One important preference is the slider to set how much weight direct and indirect votes get. Enabling automatic exclusion of votes based on preferences should also be possible. This would require some tagging of opinions as per faction - probably by third parties here.

Consider a model with three kinds of commitments, or tokens, users can employ:

• A bet. This is an actual monetary bet that over a certain period of time, a certain company, product, industry will not violate the norms, or will improve, or will never be red-lighted etc. Unlike a stock, option or bond purchase, this is a direct bet on the company's good behaviour, like a bail bond. If there is no problem with that product, company or industry, then the bet pays off with a modest return, similar to a bond - 5-10% above inflation perhaps. If there IS a problem, the value of the bet drops very drastically, becoming worthless if the product, company or industry does something to get itself fully red-lighted for the entire span of time of the bet.

• • By keeping the bets visible here, we make the conflicts of interest visible too, rather than hidden as people move money in the background (which they will anyway). It's also clear who has the most to lose if a company is about to lose status, and, more of the debate will become visible, and more of it can thus be passed on to the company or stockholders, whose interests are exactly aligned with the bet-maker

• • The money held in trust funds the whole Consumerium process and rollout, since it can be invested in various ways - ideally in ethical investing funds or sustainable forest product funds or something. This may require a backer or insurer to cover catastropic losses. No investment in any one company should be allowed for risk management purposes.

• An indirect vote. This vote cannot be used directly, but can be assigned to an registered not-for-profit organsation, including potentially a political party, that uses the voting power as decided by the governance of the organisation, thus rendering the identity of the vote holder anonymous. For verification purposes it might be a reasonable requirement that you must be a member of, or a donor to, the organisation that you give your voting power to. You may give your vote to only one organisation at a time. You may transfer it to an another organisation or just revoke it. The Burden of proof on the right to use a vote is mostly on the organisation in question.

• A direct vote. This is perhaps a little unfair since people who don't have access to computer systems are likely unable to use their direct vote. Burden of proof on authentication is yet to be solved. A partial solution could be to divide the direct votes into three distinct groups and let the consumers decide on the amount of trust they place on each group of voters:

1. Voters authenticated with cryptographic methods, where the identity of the keyholder is known by an commercial or non-commercial certification authority.
2. Voters authenticated by an email address issued by an institutional issuer such as an university, school, company or a governmental organisation ie. where it is publicly known that the postmaster checks the identities of people before issuing an email address
3. The rest ie. anonymous email services

Whether the votes are anonymized or visible or whether decision on this is left up to the voter on each issue is yet unclear. It is also unclear how to prevent abusive companies from acquiring multiple direct votes by creating many identities, or from creating their own nonprofit entities to do nothing but say the right things, and vote against their competitors, regardless of anyone's behaviour.

Counter measures against multivoting and vote buying should be meticulously evaluated. Among other measures, any product of any company found to be doing subversive measures might be "red lighted" for say a year.

Where issue is a disputed article or a campaign on a company, product group or product