The Market That Feeds 22 Million People a Day
I’m standing on a dusty overpass in eastern Mexico City, and laid out before me is something that almost defies belief. It’s not a city, but it’s bigger than many. It’s the Central de Abasto, or CEDA, the largest wholesale…
Repetition, Lean Thinking, and Thin Digital Markets
In manufacturing, repetition is the key to excellence. Systems like Lean Manufacturing, Kaizen, and Just-In-Time production rely on continuous, incremental improvement of processes that are performed over and over again. But what happens when markets are thin—when transactions are rare,…
Cosolvent as an Experiment: A Playground for Thin Market Innovation
Cosolvent is not a finished product. It’s an experiment—an open-source playground designed to test the possibilities and limits of AI-enhanced market matching. The Unknowns: These are open questions. Cosolvent is being released not as a polished solution, but as a…
Thick/Thin Structure of Grain Trade
World grain trade is dominated by large international grain trading companies who orchestrate massive shipments of bulk grains. To pay for that, grain companies typically buy the grain outright from the producers and sell it on to the eventual buyers.…
The Case for Cosolvent in Enterprise Hiring
Thin Market Characteristics Assessment Information Asymmetry: HIGH Complex Matching Criteria: VERY HIGH Scattered Participants: MODERATE Economic Viability Analysis Transaction Value vs. Platform Costs: STRONG Friction Cost Reduction: VERY HIGH Risk Mitigation Value: EXTREMELY HIGH Revenue Model Potential Pricing Power: STRONG…
Some Possible Thin Markets for Cosolvent
It’s early days, but Cosolvent’s approach to using AI to facilitate thin markets has a vast range of potential applications. Here is a list of 100 potential uses. Cosolvent probably won’t be asked to address many of them, but…
Markets for Premium Grain from Western Canada
(Mostly sourced through Claude Sonnet 4.0) Western Canadian grain producers can capture significant premiums by targeting specialty markets through identity-preserved container shipping, with opportunities ranging from 10-40% price premiums over commodity pricing. The research reveals substantial financial opportunities across multiple…
The Risks of LLM+RAG: Hallucinations, Missed Data, and How Cosolvent Mitigates Them
As powerful as Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can be, they come with real risks—especially when applied to market matching in thin and high-stakes environments. Common Risks: How Cosolvent Minimizes These Risks: Cosolvent’s approach blends automation with…
Creating Trust in Thin Markets
When Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth identified “thin markets” as a fundamental economic challenge, he highlighted a problem that has plagued commerce for centuries. These markets, where buyers and sellers are widely scattered and have difficulty finding each other, represent…