I am not familiar with DW but the idea sounds interesting.

I would imagine that the private production/research/trade could be extremely effective compared to state-run facilities, but also unstable/unreliable (subject to economic cycles, strikes, etc...) and it would be up to the player to decide how much freedom (how many tiles?) to grant the private sector

More freedom will give higher return, but also increasing risk of sudden turbulence to be dealt with (e.g. need to bail out large companies with taxpayers money or lose their production)

I wouldn't mind handing my trade over to the private sector. I wouldn't mind seeing imigration from other species. I can see a private sector of research. This is at least a realistic approach to a more realistic game. Not sure how this would change the game mechanics any more than giving the governors more automating options to change. This is an idea that sounds good.

HAhahah, pretty funny.  I couldnt make through the book either

I dont think it's useless, I think having an uncontrollable private sector can be really interesting.  I explain in the last part of my response below.

Sorry, for some reason I wrote my post assuming everybody has played DW before (it was late at night okay).  Basically the private sector is autnomous.  In GalCiv 2, you get credits per turn for a planet.  Well that is just a shorthand for the what DW calls the Private sector.  The ships just do their own thing like mine resource and earn you credits.  But it is interesting because the enemy can create trade blocks, preventing your private ships from commuting.  It an also be more interesting because they can run into random events for you, like discovering new planets, or derelict mining operations. In DW there are literally hundreds of random events that can happen which is what makes the game so interesting.  

HOWEVER You can take it even further.  Which is what I meant by there being a lot of features besides just expanding on existing ones.

For example, if you built the right system.  The private sector can cause problems for you because these are effectively your citizens.  For example, maybe they have been trading with another race for a long time, so they REALLY dont like it when you go to war with them, so you need to convince them with a propaganda campaign that the other race is evil, or you risk revolt depending on the type of government you are running.  Or if you're Drengi you have a totalitarian empire, so you dont need to convince them at all.  Maybe you have bad relations with the Drengi, one of your private citizens takes it on himself to sabatoge or attack a Drengi ship.  Now you might have a war.  That would suck.  But it makes for really interesting gameplay I think.  Because maybe you are actually trying to sabatoge them, but you convince the enemy it was a private citizen you had 0 control over.  Also, I think the implementation of the private sector with ships moving around, makes it seem much more immersive when these 'random' events happen.  The private sector is what makes DW feel so 'alive', which is what people describe it as.   There is a lot more to it than that, but this is the critical component of that.  So for John Falkenberg, this is much more than just a free market.  This is about adding valuable game systems, and enhancing immersion to feel like you're managing an empire.

Well, AI ship design will be based to some extent on the best of the uploaded player designs.  Perhaps it's not all that optimistic to hope that economic models of other players could be emulated by the AI.  And the next level would be to allow a proportion of your citizens to interact with your economy in some dynamic way.  That would be nice but make me a bit paranoid that the internet was starting to become conscious like in that movie 0_o... Anyway if a private sector is introduced to a game the absolute priority is that it's not predictable at all, otherwise it would feel tacked-on and pretentious.