Friedrich Hayek

Hayek's central claim is that the economic problem of society is not primarily one of allocating *given* resources, but of mobilizing knowledge that is never available to any single mind in concentrated form. The relevant knowledge "of the particular circumstances of time and place" is dispersed across millions of actors, is often tacit, and changes continuously. No central planner can assemble it, because much of it does not exist until decentralized actors are confronted with a concrete choice. This is the foundational asymmetry beneath everything else. The peer-reviewed articulation used as the citable anchor characterizes Hayek's market as "an information processing system characterized by spontaneous order: the emergence of coherence through the independent actions of large numbers of individuals, each with limited and local knowledge" (Berdell & others, "Retrospectives: Friedrich Hayek and the Market Algorithm," *Journal of Economic Perspectives* 2017; DOI 10.1257/jep.31.3.215). For space, the question is always: *who knows the binding constraint, and can that knowledge reach the decision-maker in time?*

Hayek's most operational idea is that prices are not merely incentives but *signals* - compressed carriers of dispersed knowledge. A change in relative scarcity is communicated to actors who need not know its cause; the price tells them how to economize. Where a rivalrous, scarce resource has *no price*, the signal is missing and over-use is the predicted equilibrium. The orbit-economics literature retrieved in the sweep is, in Hayekian terms, the formal demonstration of a *missing price*: under open access, the marginal launcher does not face the collision-risk cost it imposes on all others, so quantity over-shoots and debris accumulates (Adilov, Alexander & Cunningham, "The Economics of Orbit Use: Open Access, External Costs, and Runaway Debris Growth," *Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists* 2024; DOI 10.1086/730695). The empirical insight from comparative systems - that decentralization tracks the cost of moving information - is the same one (Huang, Li, Qian & others, "Hayek, Local Information, and Commanding Heights," *American Economic Review* 2017; DOI 10.1257/aer.20150592).

Hayek distinguished orders that *emerge* from the interaction of many agents following abstract rules (spontaneous order, *kosmos*) from orders that are *consciously arranged* toward a single hierarchy of ends (organization, *taxis*). His claim is not that design is always wrong, but that for complex systems with dispersed knowledge, a designed central order will be less adaptive and less informationally efficient than a rule-governed spontaneous order. The retrieved spectrum literature is the cleanest space-adjacent existence proof: self-governance of the radio spectrum - a rivalrous, congestible, hard-to-fence resource - "works better than we think," with appropriators crafting workable coordination rules absent both full privatization and full central command (Mueller / "Spectrum anarchy: why self-governance of the radio spectrum works better than we think," *Journal of Institutional Economics* 2020; DOI 10.1017/s1744137420000259).

The corollary of F1–F3 is Hayek's critique of central economic planning: a single authority attempting to plan a complex order must *pretend* to a synoptic knowledge it cannot possess, and will substitute its own limited model for the dispersed knowledge of the system. The failure is informational before it is political. Applied to space, this disciplines any proposal for a single global space-traffic controller or a centrally planned orbital allocation: the reviewer asks whether the proposed central body can actually acquire and update the dispersed operational knowledge (real-time ephemerides, maneuver intentions, commercial constraints) that the order requires.

Hayek's positive program is not laissez-faire-as-anarchy; it is a framework of *abstract, general, prospective rules* - nomos - within which spontaneous order can form. Good institutions supply predictable, end-independent rules (property, liability, contract) that let dispersed actors plan, rather than discretionary commands that pursue specific outcomes. The retrieved law-and-economics literature on the Coase theorem is the bridge: whether decentralized bargaining produces efficient outcomes depends entirely on the rules governing entitlements and the costs of negotiation and information (Hurwicz / "Information and the Coase Theorem," *Journal of Economic Perspectives* 1987; DOI 10.1257/jep.1.2.113). For space, the reviewer's nomos question is: *what is the entitlement structure, and is it general and prospective, or ad hoc and discretionary?*

Hayek argued that competition is valuable precisely because we do *not* know the answers in advance: it is a procedure for *discovering* facts (least-cost producers, viable technologies, workable rules) that would otherwise remain unknown. Monopoly and oligopoly are suspect not on distributional grounds alone but because they suppress this discovery function. The retrieved welfare analysis of orbital oligopoly is the direct test: when orbit use is dominated by a few constellation operators, "oligopoly competition between satellite constellations will reduce economic welfare from orbit use" relative to a more competitive or properly-priced allocation (Rao, Burgess & Kaffine, *PNAS* 2023; DOI 10.1073/pnas.2221343120). The reviewer treats any architecture that entrenches a few incumbents as having a discovery-suppression burden to discharge.