The Political Economy of Shared Experience: Interpretive Infrastructure, Preference Formation, and Value Capture

Shared experience can generate meanings, trust, reputation, practical knowledge, attention, and demand-relevant orientations. Firms, platforms, credentialing bodies, and other institutions make selected products of these relations portable through narratives, metrics, classifications, rankings, references, and interfaces. This paper develops a preliminary political economy of that conversion. Its philosophical and interdisciplinary review connects commodity form and alienation, culture industry, taste and distinction, adaptive and endogenous preferences, signaling and valuation devices, value co-creation, prosumption, free and affective labor, branding, platformization, classification, ranking, epistemic injustice, and relational accounts of alienation. The paper proposes interpretive infrastructure as the sociotechnical arrangement through which shared experience becomes legible, portable, comparable, actionable, and revisable. A formal stage architecture then separates relational production, encounter design, trace selection, interpretive framing, preference formation, observable action, value realization, benefit allocation, and future relational conditions. Two exact countermodels establish limited identification results. Observed action and self-report can fit both stable-preference and preference-formation models. Equal realized total value can fit coalition models with reversed contribution attributions. A model-relative contribution set and benefit profile therefore replace a single contribution estimate. A recursive dynamic represents hosting, measurement, classification, ranking, and later experience design; convergence follows only under an explicit contraction condition and carries a separate normative status. Constructed cases involving branded celebration, platform communities, and credentials illustrate the framework. The paper concludes with a plural diagnostic for interpretive appropriation, ethical research designs, institution-level response options, and revision conditions. The contribution is a conservative, revisable compositional framework whose scope is narrower than a general theory of commodification or platform power.