[1][2] The historical debate was cast between the Austrian School represented by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who argued against the feasibility of socialism; and between neoclassical and Marxian economists, most notably Cläre Tisch (as a forerunner), Oskar R. Lange, Abba P. Lerner, Fred M. Taylor, Henry Douglas Dickinson and Maurice Dobb, who took the position that socialism was both feasible and superior to capitalism.
[7] Although Marx and Engels never elaborated on the specific institutions that would exist in socialism or on processes for conducting planning in a socialist system, their broad characterizations laid the foundation for the general conception of socialism as an economic system devoid of the law of value and law of accumulation and principally where the category of value was replaced by calculation in terms of natural or physical units so that resource allocation, production and distribution would be considered technical affairs to be undertaken by engineers and technical specialists.
[10][11] Other market abolitionist socialists such as Robin Cox of the Socialist Party of Great Britain argue that decentralized planning allows for a spontaneously self-regulating system of stock control (relying solely on calculation in kind) to come about and that in turn decisively overcomes the objections raised by the economic calculation argument that any large scale economy must necessarily resort to a system of market prices.
In his model, assuming perfect computation techniques, simultaneous equations relating inputs and outputs to ratios of equivalence would provide appropriate valuations in order to balance supply and demand.
[15] Jan Appel drafted a contribution to the socialist calculation debate which then went through a discussion process before being published as Foundations of Communist Production and Distribution by the General Workers' Union of Germany in 1930.
He suggests that more likely the problems resulted from bad incentives arising out of the one-party political system and degree of power granted to the party elite.
[24] Peter Joseph argues for a transition from fragmented economic data relay to fully integrated, sensor-based digital systems, or an Internet of things.
[25] Using an internet of sensory instruments to measure, track and feed back information, this can unify numerous disparate elements and systems, greatly advancing awareness and efficiency potentials.
[26] In an economic context, this approach could relay and connect data regarding how best to manage resources, production processes, distribution, consumption, recycling, waste disposal behavior, consumer demand and so on.
Such a process of networked economic feedback would work on the same principle as modern systems of inventory and distribution found in major commercial warehouses.
Mechanisms related networked digital feedback systems make it possible to efficiently monitor shifting consumer preference, demand, supply and labor value, virtually in real time.
[32] As of February 2018, it is now possible to track trillions of economic interactions related to the supply chain and consumer behavior by way of sensors and digital relay as seen with the advent of Amazon Go.
[33] Paul Cockshott, Allin Cottrell, and Andy Pollack have proposed new forms of coordination based on modern information technology for non-market socialism.
David McMullen argues that social ownership of the means of production and the absence of markets for them is fully compatible with a decentralized price system.
Bids and offer prices would aim to minimize costs and ensure that output is guided by expected final demand for private and collective consumption.
By fusing game theory with information economics, mechanism design provided the language and framework in which both socialists and advocates of capitalism could compare the merits of their arguments.
As Palda (2013) writes in his summary of the contributions of mechanism design to the socialist calculation debate, "[i]t seemed that socialism and capitalism were good at different things.