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tegwick 574bb11db6 feat(example): add supply-chain-vsm composition demo (S3.5)

Demonstrates infospace composition: the Wealth of Nations infospace is
used as a discipline, applying Smith's economic framework as a lens to
analyse modern supply chain management concepts.

New example: examples/supply-chain-vsm/
- infospace.yaml binding WoN as discipline (../infospace-with-history)
- 3 source documents: coordination mechanisms, capital & inventory,
  market structure (~400 words each, original content)
- supply-chain-entity-schema-v1.0.md with WoN Concept required section
- won-mapping-schema-v1.0.md with Conceptual Continuity rating
- artifacts/won-reference/core-entities.md — 12 curated WoN entities
  for injection as discipline context
- 8 hand-crafted entity files demonstrating LLM output format
- 3 mapping files with full rationale and VSM inheritance chains
- Viable: YES (5/5 thresholds)

Key mappings demonstrated:
  Demand Signal          → Effectual Demand        (Strong, S2)
  Vendor-Managed Inventory → Division of Labour    (Strong, S1/S2)
  Just-in-Time Inventory → Circulating Capital     (Strong, S1/S3)
  Bullwhip Effect        → Natural Price           (Moderate, S2)
  Platform Intermediary  → Merchant Capital        (Strong, S2/S4)
  Monopsony Power        → Combination of Masters  (Strong, S3*)

Platform fix: entity_parser.py now recognises ## Supply Chain Domain
as a domain alias for ## Economic Domain, enabling composed infospaces
to use their own domain section name.

Tutorial §13 rewritten with real commands, real output, and the full
mapping table from the demo.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-02-23 00:08:51 +01:00

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Platform Intermediary

Definition

A company that controls the infrastructure through which supply chain participants transact, without itself producing or consuming goods. Platform intermediaries earn revenue from network access fees, transaction commissions, data analytics, and financing services. Their market power derives from network effects: value accrues to participants proportionally to the size of the network, creating winner-take-most dynamics. Unlike traditional intermediaries, platforms bear no inventory risk — that remains with producers and carriers.

Source

Market Structure in Modern Supply Chains, §Platform Intermediaries

Supply Chain Domain

Market Structure

VSM Assignment

S4 — Platform intermediaries function as the intelligence layer of the supply chain, aggregating and intermediating market information across many buyers and sellers simultaneously. They are not operational (S1) but shape what operations are possible and at what price.

WoN Concept

Merchant Capital — Smith's analysis of merchant capital — capital employed to buy in one market and sell in another, earning profit from differential access — maps closely to platform intermediaries. Both earn profit not from production but from controlling access to exchange. Smith noted that merchants are geographically mobile and have no necessary loyalty to any particular productive system, giving them structural leverage over producers who are fixed. Platform intermediaries exhibit the same dynamic at unprecedented scale: the platform has no physical attachment, yet producers who exit lose access to the entire buyer network.

Modern Context

Platform intermediaries represent a structural innovation Smith could not have anticipated: they capture the coordination function of merchant capital while eliminating its inventory risk and capital requirements. The result is a higher-leverage, lower-capital form of intermediation than Smith described, but the underlying logic — control of the exchange infrastructure creates extractable surplus — is precisely what he analysed.

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