A perfectly efficient market was a concept in economics.
It referred to a completely idealized market, one in which there were infinitely many buyers and sellers, and no single market action could cause a change in market prices. At the same time, products were homogeneous, so companies could not form monopolies through product uniqueness and enjoy monopoly profits. It was also a market where resources flowed freely, information was completely open and complete, and no information barriers existed.
"Of course that's impossible, but I'll do everything I can to let people obtain as much market information as possible at the lowest possible cost," Murphy said.
Patrick understood. "That could be considered the extreme of a market economy, yet it's also close to the extreme of a planned economy."
Whether market or plan, the ultimate goal was to achieve more effective regulation. The flaw of a market economy actually lay in the opacity of market information. Most people could not cross information barriers to see the direction of the market clearly, thus causing a waste of productive capacity.
The flaw of a planned economy, however, lay in its inability to make timely, reasonable, real-time adjustments based on changes in market information.
In fact, even if Pioneer's computing power increased by a million times, it still would not be able to regulate the entire market in a completely reasonable way, because the market was made up of countless individuals. The complexity of human behavior meant that no method currently existed that could completely predict changes in the market, so naturally complete and reasonable regulation was impossible as well.
Unless some super-sociological achievement like Asimov's "Psychohistory," capable of accurately predicting overall human behavior, appeared in the future, this was an N-body problem, with N greater than or equal to one hundred million.
So