Buy shares in a megaproject

mr-hire already mentioned movies, but the other thing this reminds me of is the way people used to fund ocean voyages.

I don't recall all the specifics, but it's something like this. Sending a bunch of stuff across the ocean used to be risky, and in particular that the risk is high enough (if we take risk here to be the product of probability of failure times capital outlays) that generally a individual investor is not willing to take it on. The straightforward way to handle this was with partnerships, and it's the method that was in use for thousands of years for all sorts of endeavors with this risk profile from ocean voyages to trans-Saharan caravans, so much so that some religions actually codify rules about how to manage these partnerships.

Then we get the innovation of the joint-stock company and one of the first things it's used for is not creating long-lived corporations (although this follows after a few decades of experience with them) but creating time-limited corporations to finance ocean trade. It then becomes possible for a person to invest in projects, specifically ocean voyages, and also create a diversified portfolio of investing partially in many ocean voyages so that even if n% fail the 1-n% that succeed are enough to turn a profit.

Again, as mr-hire says, movies are something where a model something like this is still alive today. We have something like this alive for megaprojects in the form of municipal bonds sold to cover specific projects, but this is obviously not a complete solution. It's interesting to me to ask why we don't use time or project limited corporations that start with clear end states where everyone gets paid back at the end and the corporation wraps up more often; it's a thing we did in the past more often (relative to total corporations created) and do now in some domains or through alternative mechanisms, so I wonder why it seems to have dropped as so frequent a finance mechanism.

It's not obvious what you'd actually be buying in a "share" of a non-profit-motivated project. What's your reward for being right (that the project is undervalued and you can buy a share for less than you should) or punishment for being wrong (that the project is overvalued and you should have bought a share in something else)?

You may simply be talking about prediction markets on the outcome of megaprojects. I'd support that, but you should be clear that it's not a share in the project, it's a wager on a predicted conditional outcome.

i don't think anything prevents corporations from being created with a limited lifespan, it just doesn't come up.

how are the shares supposed to return value to the share holders?

It isn't clear to me how this resolves the problem of Megaprojects. If the shares fall, then perhaps we can tell that the project is likely to fall behind and be assessed a penalty and knowing that will allow some mitigation, but that's a pretty minor fix.

This is a cool idea. A fun test of this might be to create a few markets for existing mega-projects on an open prediction market like Augur, and see if you can drum up any interest for people actually investing in their outcomes.