Restoring Transparency to Automated Authority

Leading finance, health care, and internet firms shroud key operations in secrecy. Our markets, research, and life online are increasingly mediated by institutions that suffer serious transparency deficits. When a private entity grows important enough, it should be subject to transparency requirements that reflect its centrality. The increasing intertwining of governmental, business, and academic entities should provide some leverage for public-spirited appropriators and policymakers to insist on more general openness.However well an "invisible hand" coordinates economic activity generally, markets depend on reliable information about the practices of core firms that finance, rank, and rate entities in the rest of the economy. Brandishing quasi-governmental authority to determine which enterprises are funded and found, they need to be held to a higher standard than the average firm