That’s kind of an interesting and profound question. I’m inclined to answer that it’s a way of efficiently allocating resources without making decisions in other words, there is no group voting about allocating resources. Of course, “efficiency” is probably in the eye of the beholder.
I would argue that the decisions are still made, first at the individual level choices, then as the larger behavior that emerges from them. The strange part is that you can't point to any specific entity making those larger choices (aside from "the economy" or whatever) but I'd say they're still being made. This ultimately comes down to how you want to define "decision" though.
Yep, I agree with this. No one is making macro scale resource allocation decisions and yet resources are allocated reasonably efficiently (for some value of “efficiency”). The collective “decision” is an emergent property of countless individual decisions, much like an ant colony exhibits complex and sophisticated decision making as an emergent property of simple individual decisions.
Or like a bunch of neurons doing their thing.