> The above statement is a paraphrase of what I thought the author's argument was.
Fair enough.
> Amazon has more information than a single market participant has. Since it is the market because it is a marketplace-as-a-service, it has exactly the information that Hayek says the sum total of all market participants have.
No, it doesn't. It has all the information that a large market participant has--i.e., a market participant that has a very large number of transactions with a very large number of other market participants. Hayek was perfectly well aware that such market participants existed (after all, such participants existed in his day--for example, Standard Oil).
But Amazon's information is still limited to information that a market participant can have: namely, as I said, the prices at which the various goods it sells are sold. It does not have any more information than that. It has information about a lot more transactions than most other market participants, but the information it has about each transaction is the same as what the other participant in the transaction has, no more.
Fair enough.
> Amazon has more information than a single market participant has. Since it is the market because it is a marketplace-as-a-service, it has exactly the information that Hayek says the sum total of all market participants have.
No, it doesn't. It has all the information that a large market participant has--i.e., a market participant that has a very large number of transactions with a very large number of other market participants. Hayek was perfectly well aware that such market participants existed (after all, such participants existed in his day--for example, Standard Oil).
But Amazon's information is still limited to information that a market participant can have: namely, as I said, the prices at which the various goods it sells are sold. It does not have any more information than that. It has information about a lot more transactions than most other market participants, but the information it has about each transaction is the same as what the other participant in the transaction has, no more.