The researcher (Kent) didn’t make any stupid assumptions. He built a model that demonstrates how a variable that is being controlled relative to different reference levels by two or more control systems can end up being kept in a virtual reference state, protected from the effects of disturbance, so that the variable appears to be controlled by the collective – a virtual controlled variable.
The modeling is done extremely well. My only complaint about it is that the behavior of the model has not been compared to that of a collective of real people. Doing that might lead to some surprising discrepancies between model and data, and maybe not. But I can’t evaluate the usefulness of the model as an explanation of social phenomena until I see how well it handles real data.
As it sits, Kent’s is a perfectly competent model. It is also clearly consistent with the “free market” concept of how people should be able to operate in an economy. If there are higher level systems operating that are trying to set references cooperatively, this should be shown explicitly in the model. But as it sits, there is no cooperation in the model; there is only conflict. Maybe conflict is what the higher level systems in all the individuals in the collective want but, again, if that is so, it should be shown in the model. But I remember Kent saying in some of the early publications on this that his aim was to show that stability can emerge from conflict (which, I believe, is a tenet of free market economics as well) and his model demonstrates this admirably. Now the question, for me anyway, is whether or not this is actually the case in real life.
Best, Rick