Fundamental socio-economic coordination process and metacoordination

In the agents’ socio-economic activity coordination, the factors important for the results of this activity, information about which, as Hayek noted, is distributed among the participants of the activity, can be taken into account by agents with varying degrees of completeness. The perfection of procedures for identifying such factors and the degree to which they are taken into account in the coordination process can determine greater or lesser benefits of agents from their joint activity. Thus, improving coordination characteristics can be considered as one of the sources of increasing the benefits of agents from their joint activity. In this study, the concept of a shared mental model (SMM) is used as a way for agents to take into account information that is important for coordinating their activities and which is initially distributed among all agents. Based on a number of hypotheses, the SMM features are described under three main options for communications between agents: direct communications, indirect communications, and the absence of communications. The transformation of the SMM into a universal instrument for coordinating socio-economic activities, the main elements of which are the “interface” and the “calculator”, is considered. The functioning of the universal coordination instrument is based on the fundamental process of coordination, which is present in all types of coordinated socio-economic activities. Among consequences arising from the results obtained are considered the possibility of generalizing the concept of general equilibrium, methodological connections with the concept of transaction costs and with the institutional economics. It is noted that this approach makes it possible to explore ways to build a unified model of socio-economic coordination, as well as to develop a metacoordination mechanism designed to improve existing coordination mechanisms and design new ones.