Alright, so there are basically two different versions of the ECP, that of hayek and that of mises.

Mises is simpler, so let's start with him.

In his essence his argument is: if all industry is nationalized there is no longer any market for capital goods. Absent a market for capital goods, you have no prices. Absent prices, it's impossible for producers to pick between various different production techniques because they have no real way of comparing them because both labor and capital goods are heterogenous.

That's the summary anyways.

Within a market (let's say, year to year, to make things simpler) you begin the year with a stock of physical goods and a consumer base with a certain amount of money. Consumers competitively bid for goods within this physical stock. Goods that are scarce relative to demand will have higher prices (because a lot of consumers are trying to outbid each other), and ones that are low relative to demand will have lower prices. From here we have established prices for consumer goods.

Now, producers want to make a profit. They see these prices and, from there use that as the basis for their own production decisions. Producers then bid for existing stocks of capital goods with consumer prices in mind. The bidding process works similarly, i.e. relative scarcity -> high prices and low scarcity -> low prices. With both consumer prices and capital goods prices established through several "rounds" of competitive bidding, you are now able to choose between alternative production techniques. From here you can then allocate both capital goods because you have a basis of comparison.

Absent this bidding process, you do not have said basis, and so you cannot compare. Personally, it seems to me that Mises overstated the "impossibility" here. Sure you don't have prices to compare but that doesn't necessarily mean any and all allocation decisions are impossible. The state could arbitrarily choose, or choose based on some algorithm including scarcity rankings of some kind (assuming perfect information about preferences and local needs, which we'll get to with hayek). Would that be as efficient? Who knows. The ussr did manage to do it for decades tho, tho not as efficiently. But, the basic argument is that, absent competitive bidding, it's not clear on what basis planners would be able to choose between alternative production techniques (so should I use 2A and 1B or 1A and 2B assuming both are equally technically efficient). I've seen proposals to do this via the law of minimum, by Robin Cox, tho idk how viable that is or if there's work on that.

This process also gets much more complicated for fixed capital investments, whose returns aren't immediately clear. This is because they often have very large upfront investments that raises costs, but these costs may pan out in the future. However, those costs may not be justified long term. So you need a way of effectively deciding between whether a long term lower MC is better than a short term higher MC. This can be established via comparative profitability (well technically not, because it's based on estimates, but still). This is harder to do absent prices.

Does the above sound correct?

Hayek's was a bit different

Hayek's version focused on knowledge problems. In essence, his principle idea was that different agents in different parts of the economy all effectively have limited and often tacit knowledge that is specific to them. So like, factory workers may have better knowledge of what the actual state of machinery is than the CEO, or factory managers may better understand who is a more reliable supplier, how company funds are actually spent, etc.

And these people often have an incentive to misrepresent that information, or simply don't know its worth. So like, if your monthly budget is granted, and you don't want to potentially lose out on money in case of trouble or to line your own pocket next month, you have an incentive to inflate operating expenses and thereby ask for more resources than you actually need. Or you can like "improve" your performance year after year by over-estimating needs, and then "over-performing" when given more than needed (iirc this was a pretty common occurrence within soviet style command economies).

Anyways point is, different agents have different knowledge of actual conditions and do not always have an incentive to provide that information or have an incentive to actively distort it. Or they may not really be able to articulate or convey it or not know its importance and relevance (hence tacit knowledge)

The greater the degree of centralization the worse this problem becomes as the people who actually have knowledge aren't making the calls or aren't able to contribute to the overall plan, and whatever plan is established at the high level isn't based on complete information or actively false information.

For hayek, prices served as a sort of decentralized coordination mechanism through which information was revealed. These prices tell producers two things. 1) minimize the amount of high scarcity goods you use, and if you use them, you gotta really need them (cause otherwise you're spending a lot of money you don't have to). and 2) next year, produce even more of these goods. To hayek it didn't really matter why a good was scarce, only that it was, and prices conveyed this information to people.

Personally, I can certainly see some merit in that idea of prices, i.e., that it doesn't matter why they go up or down to me, i just need to economize/produce more, in the short term. But in the long term? It does kind of matter. If prices are rising because of a temporary shortage then sure, i need to minimize my use of tin or whatever now, but if it's only temporary I don't need to invest in new production facilities that use other kinds of metals. Or if it's a transportation issue with my supplier, I may just need to change suppliers. Or if it's due to a cartel forming rather than any material reality, then I would push for anti-trust rather than economizing on tin right? So long-term, the why does kind of matter right?

Are these two descriptions accurate for describing issues with centrally planned economies? Did I accurately describe both the Mises critique and the hayek one? If not, where did I go wrong?