Noah Smith is an economics writer at Noahpinion. In the AI-outsourcing piece, he uses transaction cost theory to ask whether AI will shrink companies into solopreneurs or instead make large firms more valuable because long-term trust between AI-mediated counterparties becomes expensive to verify.source: noah-smith-ai-outsourcing-transaction-costs-2026.md
His useful contribution to this wiki is not another generic "AI will change work" claim, but a mechanism: the size of firms depends on whether AI lowers or raises the cost of finding, monitoring, verifying, and trusting external contractors. That makes his argument a bridge between ai-labor-market, organizational-moats, and ai-outsourcing-transaction-costs.source: noah-smith-ai-outsourcing-transaction-costs-2026.md
Related pages: ai-outsourcing-transaction-costs, ai-labor-market, organizational-moats, japanese-corporate-diversification.