Self-Evaluation

The closest parallel to self-evaluation within the current money system may be the sealed bids system used to put in competing tenders for carrying out a contract. Competitors' tenders are opened, and the contract given to the lowest bidder. The sealed bid system works by stimulating opposite desires within each bidder:

Counter-balanced pressures within the Sealed Bid system

The system of sealed bids, however, still works within a single-value scoring system that imposes a conflict between buyer and seller. Altruistic Economics by contrast, has no such tension, as it has no legal obligations to confound people's own morals. People are free to meet whichever requests they wish - and the system of sympathy means that, typically, they will prefer to deal with people who are closer to them, whose self-evaluations they will be best placed to interpret correctly.

Any system in which people are not free to make their own evaluation of events will promote deception and thus distort relations between people. Self-evaluation is therefore the only class of measuring systems that can possibly avoid a systemic pressure to hide information. Such a system of course gives people the freedom to deliberately mis-report transactions' benefits in an attempt to cheat. This is why altruistic economics, in an analagous way to the sealed bid system, is resistant against crude exploitation through over-evaluation and under-evaluation of the subjective value of a transaction.

People's ability to record one another's evaluations is one disincentive to deceitful conduct, as is the backing of real-world social relations between participants. Ultimately, it remains to be seen how people will respond to self-regulation, but there is reason to believe it will prove more resilient than the scarcity-based traditional money system.