Micro-level description of the economic coordination

Economic agents (people) by information exchange can take into account each other's activities. This allows them to coordinate their individual actions. The current study identifies three basic forms of coordination, the content of which depends on the communication options between agents: 1) the contractual form, which is possible with direct communication between agents; 2) the stigmergy form, which is possible with indirect communication; and 3) the common rules-based action form, which is possible in the absence of communication. The proposed three basic forms of coordination reflect the diversity of natural abilities of humans to take into account the activities of other humans. The observable processes of economic coordination, e.g., the market, etc., can be represented as some manifestations of these three basic forms. It is proposed to consider these representations as the micro-level descriptions of coordination processes. Such micro-level descriptions can be treated as a fundamental one that allows us to make the assertion that all observable economic coordination processes can be represented as certain combinations of the proposed three basic forms. As a proof of this assertion, the known economic coordination processes like the market, hierarchy and network are considered as certain combinations of the basic forms of coordination. Based on this micro-level approach, the specific features of economic activity, which determine the structure and main characteristics of the system of economic coordination processes, are analyzed. The analysis showed that the processes of economic coordination at the micro-level are a complex hybrid of the three basic forms of coordination. The system of economic coordination processes consists of the one main process and two branches of additional processes. This approach can be used as a unified methodological basis for the analysis of diverse ways of economic coordination. The analysis results obtained by this way allow us to explore directions for the improvement of coordination processes in the economy.