Beyond Informational Stock: Collective Readiness, Founder Residuals, and the Misallocation of Value in AI-Era Production

Abstract

In prior work, I argued that informational stock should be treated as an independent factor of production. Informational stock consists of measurable reductions in uncertainty about economically relevant outcomes, and its omission from production theory leads to the systematic misattribution of value to capital. This paper extends that argument by identifying a further source of misallocation in AI-era firm valuation. Even where informational stock is recognized, valuation practice still tends to assign socially produced value to the legal shell of the firm and, in practice, to founders and shareholders.

I introduce collective readiness as the broader social and institutional condition that helps explain why some firms become scalable at particular historical moments despite limited direct founder capital and limited direct founder labor. Collective readiness has four components: collective attention, collective receptivity, diffusion momentum, and institutional-infrastructural fit. These variables capture the conditions under which an idea becomes legible, desirable, adoptable, and scalable.

Using the Medvi case as a motivating example, I argue that extraordinary founder capture in the AI era cannot be explained solely by founder capital, founder labor, or even firm-specific informational stock. It also depends on preexisting social and infrastructural conditions that the founder did not create alone. I therefore propose a decomposed residual method for determining what the founder should legitimately keep after accounting for returns to capital, labor, informational contributors, collective readiness, ecosystem dependencies, and other contractual claims.

The central claim is straightforward. Current valuation practice correctly identifies that much firm value is intangible, but it misattributes that value by attaching it too quickly to legal control of output rather than decomposing the distributed inputs that made the output possible. Informational stock explains why measurable uncertainty reduction is productive. Collective readiness explains why that productive structure becomes scalable at a particular moment. Together, they provide a more rigorous framework for assigning who should get what from the valuable firm.