The following refers to Christian Siefkes book, From Exchange to Contributions: Generalizing Peer Production into the Physical World. (Edition C. Siefkes, Berlin, 2007), and the occasional critique that the proposed effort sharing scheme is in fact a market.

Christian Siefkes:

“Markets are based on private, uncoordinated production using privately owned means of production, whose output is afterwards exchanged.

In the peer economy model, production is not private but social from the very start: Since the tasks necessary to satisfy peoples wishes are shared (divided up), producers always know that they are meeting an existing need, that there will be somebody who will use their products.

In the peer economy model, resources and means of production are commons. They may be used by projects (i.e. they become possession–something that is used), but they are never privately owned by anybody: nobody has the right or the effective means to sell them or withhold them until the others fulfill one’s conditions. (Owners of resources and means of production have the means of backmail non-owners–that’s never the case in peer production.)

So these, I think, are the fundamental differences between markets and the commons-based peer economy: production is social from the very start since tasks are shared; and production is based on commons, not on private property.

There are, of course, other important differences such as that, in a peer economy, nobody would need to suffer hunger or other basic wants due to being unable to successfully sell anything. But these differences actually follow from the differences outlined above, between sharing tasks (where there is a bit to do for everybody) and selling/exchanging stuff, as well as between private, exclusion-based access to resources and means of production vs. common, inclusion-based access.”