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The purpose of this article is to analyze the relation between scientific knowledge in the form of theories and the world that such theories are about. The focus is on market theories. I argue that everyday knowledge, conceptualized using the notion of 'lifeworld,' is the bedrock of scientific knowledge. I also make two distinctions, one between types of markets and one between principles of order in markets. There are two different types of markets, fixed-role markets and switch-role markets, and no existing theory can be used to explain both of them. In fixed-role markets, such as a producer market of garments, actors are identified as either sellers or buyers. In switch-role markets, such as the stock exchange market or currency market, actors are not identified with one role. The other distinction is between standard and status markets. In a status market, order is maintained because the identities of actors on both sides of the market are ranked according to status, which is a more entrenched social construction than the commodity traded in the market. In a market characterized by standards, the situation is reversed: the commodity is a more entrenched social construction than the social status of actors in the market. These distinctions are the backdrop of my analysis of the idea that markets are performed. It is concluded that the performativity approach is useful today for analyzing switch-role markets. A further conclusion is that neoclassical economic theory can be used in understanding switch-role markets, but not fixed-role markets.

We utilize a randommatching model to examine the relationships between market frictions and international trade. In our setting, an individual may choose to search abroad where she may have a cost advantage, but is less likely to meet potential trading partners, owing to higher market frictions. Interestingly, we find that international trade may be associated with lower welfare than autarky. We show how this is due to price distortions resulting from bargaining when there are opportunities for exchange across countries.

A study is conducted to design a socially optimal market structure to control excessive entry of firms in to product market, which effects the social cost of public funds.

A study examining the extent to which costs can be minimized on public debt, in a scenario where short-term interest rates are dictated by monetary policy and there are risks and market impact constraints, is presented.

This paper presents an experiment to investigate the impact of information externalities in a search model. The model implies that information spillovers create an initial delay in action by agents, followed by a flurry of activity once some public information is revealed. Conversely, this experiment reveals a shorter delay prior to the first subject moving than the model suggests. Furthermore, the subsequent increase in activity is greater than predicted. However, as the sessions progress, the subjects exhibit a degree of learning in each treatment. They prolong their search for higher payouts and, hence, their behaviour approaches that of the model's optimal strategy.

Research shows that analytical capabilities and market information processing practices improve for organizations demonstrating more favorable learning values. This in turn affects market-based outcomes. These findings are discussed within the framework of current literature and future research.

This paper extends the theory of multinational corporations, identifying three distinct influences of internal trade liberalization by a group of countries on the level and pattern of inward foreign direct investment (FDI). First, the tariff jumping motive encourages plant consolidation. Second, the export platform motive favours FDI with only a single union plant relative to exporting, and may induce a firm which has never exported to invest. Finally, reduced internal tariffs increase competition from domestic firms, which dilutes the other motives and may induce a `Fortress Europe' outcome of multinationals leaving union markets even though external tariffs are unchanged.

We analyze a dynamic version of the Akerlof-Wilson 'lemons' market in a competitive durable good setting. There is a fixed set of sellers with private information about the quality of their wares. The price mechanism sorts sellers of different qualities into different time periods--prices and average quality of goods traded increase over time. Goods of all qualities are traded in finite time. Market failure arises because of the waiting involved--particularly for sellers of better quality. The equilibrium path may exhibit intermediate breaks in trading.

In this paper we suggest an improved methodology for comparing the intensity of trade across and within national and provincial boundaries. Earlier efforts to assess border effects for provinces or for countries without internal trade statistics made fairly arbitrary assumptions about average distances for internal trade flows. We improve on earlier efforts by taking more complete account of the distribution of population within each province or country. Internal distance is estimated as a population-weighted average of intra-city and intercity distances as well as distances to and within rural areas. We find higher estimates of internal distances, and hence border effects, than found in previous studies.

Contract design under incomplete information is often analysed in a bilaterally monopolistic setting. If the informed party's reservation value does not depend on its private information (its type), it is a standard result that the uninformed side offers 'low' types distorted contracts to reduce the information rent left to 'high' types. We challenge this result by embedding contract design in a matching market environment. We consider a market where players meet pairwise and where, in each match, either side may be chosen to make a take-it-or-leave-it offer. As frictions become sufficiently low, we find that the set of equilibria is independent of whether there is complete or incomplete information. In particular, all contracts are free of distortions.

This article re-evaluates the authors' previous explanations for profitability momentum strategies. The authors also provide support for behavioral models that propose delayed overreactions to be the reason for momentum profits.

This article evaluates institutional corporate bond trading to estimate transaction costs for over-the-counter bond markets. The author finds that larger trades have lower trading costs, small institutions pay more than large institutions in order to trade, and large bond dealers charge less than small ones.

This article evaluates the significance of banking market structure on growth, focusing on the role of this structure on the dynamics of capital accumulation. The authors find that bank concentration promotes growth of industry sectors in most need of external finance by aiding credit access for newer firms, but also find a general depressing effect of bank concentration on all sectors.

This article evaluates aggregate market spreads, depths and trading activities to analyze liquidity in U.S. equities over an extended period of time. The authors find that liquidity plummets in down markets, volatility decreases trading activity and spreads, strong day-of-the-week effects exist, and that interest rates influence liquidity with increases in depth and trading activity just prior to macroeconomic announcements.

This article examines the decisions of strategic traders in a noisy financial market when they hold an endowment of stock. Results show that after receiving the endowment the trader reduces risk exposure by selling at decreased rates and then buying back shares.

This article examines the volatility of common stocks at the market, firm and industry levels using a disaggregated approach. Results show an increase in the firm-level volatility from 1962-1997; the correlations between individual stocks and the market model's explanatory power has declined, while the number of stocks needed for diversification have increased; finally, market volatility leads the other volatility areas.

Research presented concerns the economic impact of stock market liberalization, or a country's policy to allow foreign purchasing of stocks. Findings suggest that the country that liberalizes it's stock market can lower the cost of equity capital by promoting risk-sharing between foreign and domestic agents.

Many facility location decision models ignore the fact that for a facility to survive it needs a minimum demand level to cover costs. In this paper we present a decision model for a firm that wishes to enter a spatial market where there are several competitors already located. This market is such that for each outlet there is a demand threshold level that has to be achieved in order to survive. The firm wishes to know where to locate its outlets so as to maximize its market share taking into account the threshold level. It may happen that due to this new entrance, some competitors will not be able to meet the threshold and therefore will disappear. A formulation is presented together with a heuristic solution method and computational experience.

An analysis of the effects of price discrimination in two-dimensional markets reveals that each firm gains a monopolistic area in the center of the market that has the same shape as the entire market but with a distorted separating line depending on its extension. The study shows that firms that can apply price discrimination could not always make higher profits that firms that cannot apply the same techniques.

This paper models trading patterns when marketplaces exist and goods are differentiated. When first visiting the market, a buyer samples a stock of goods. If fortunate, the buyer finds a match, purchases one of these goods and then exits. If not, the buyer can now only match with the flow of new goods. In a steady state, the stock of unmatched traders on one side of the market is trying to match with the flow of new traders on the other side. This behaviour is shown to describe matching patterns between unemployed job seekers and vacancies in U.K. Job Centres.

We consider a common-property resource sold in imperfectly competitive markets. There is a dynamic externality (current harvests lower future stocks, raising future harvest costs) and a static (crowding) externality. Increasing industry size raises costs but lowers prices; thus, it has ambiguous welfare effects. The optimal industry size typically changes over time, so that a first-best outcome cannot be obtained with a fixed number of firms. Single-firm exploitation is optimal only under special circumstances. The socially optimal open-loop steady-state industry size corresponds to the static optimum; both generally differ from the closed-loop steady-state optimum.

The complete characterization of quality choices in a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation is presented, where firms choose the quality of the product and then compete in prices. Market outcomes at the price stage are shown as endogenous outcomes of equilibrium quality choice. The distribution of consumers' tastes is considered as the decisive factor in product differentiation.

The heart of modern economics is the study of 'the market,' eventually ensuing in the General Equilibrium model. J. M. Keynes ignored this line of inquiry but from 1907, when he was at the India Office, to the 1940s, when he made proposals for the post-war reconstruction of the financial system, he often addressed himself to the functioning of markets. He is critical of many markets for promoting instability, and especially for embodying low values (greed, fears). It is suggested that Keynes' views on markets were shaped by his personal experiences as an investor; by his realistic, non-theoretical approach; by his anti-Benthamite values and by his sensitivity to the unemployment and 'chaos' they often caused.

This paper is concerned with decentralized models of market equilibrium in which the primary interest lies in the nature of the institutions that govern trade. There are two separate branches in this literature. In the first, the institutions that govern trade are taken to be given exogenously. The primary motivation for models in this class is essentially the study of comparative institutions. In particular the papers are interested in whether there are specific institutions that will generate Walrasian prices and allocations approximately when transactions costs are small. In the second branch of the literature, the institutions that govern trade themselves are made endogenous. These models characterize the nature of these endogenously generated institutions and examine their efficiency in environments where transactions costs are small.

It is commonly accepted that 'free markets' existed at least to some extent in the USSR during the New Economic Policy (NEP). Support for this notion comes from Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Preobrazhenskii, and a whole host of other participants and commentators on the 1920s. Despite this, there is little empirical analysis of markets, free or otherwise, which can be called upon to support or refute the notion, in either Soviet or western literature. Thus the purpose of this article is to begin to investigate market behaviour in the USSR in the 1920s by focusing on commodity markets such as those for grain and manufactures, and to see to what extent they could be called 'free' markets. Correlation and regression techniques are commonly used for analysing the degree of development of markets. By subjecting price data from different regions of a country to correlation analysis a judgement can be made about whether such markets are unified, based on the axiom that in a single market similarity of price movement for a given good prevails. However, it is clearly problematic to take such a measurement as an indicator of the degree of 'freeness' of markets. Nevertheless, as capitalism requires national markets in order to function, it is one step towards an analysis of the 'freeness' of markets to analyse their degree of integration. It is certainly the case that non-integrated markets cannot be free markets in the capitalist sense, and therefore integration is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for 'freeness'. It could be argued that non-capitalist free markets could exist at a local level, and thus that integration is not a necessary condition for 'freeness'. This may be logically possible, but it is clear that when Lenin, Trotsky, and all the other commentators speak of allowing the 'free market' to exist in NEP they actually mean free markets in a capitalist sense, that is where the market mechanism operates. For this to happen, it would seem reasonable to argue that higher levels of market integration are required than the purely local. Thus, this article focuses on correlation analysis of commodity price movements in the USSR during NEP as a first step towards a more rigorous analysis of NEP markets. A perennial problem with correlation analysis is to determine what numerical result justifies the conclusion that the markets under analysis are indeed unified. To overcome this difficulty, correlation coefficients for commodity markets in the USSR are compared with corresponding coefficients for markets in the US. If Soviet markets are close to the integration levels found in the US (which is regarded as the paradigm of free trade capitalism) it seems reasonable to conclude that they were indeed unified. A danger with correlation analysis is that the presence of autocorrelation in datasets - when successive values of a time series are related rather than independent - may lead to detected correlation levels being exaggerated. To overcome this problem, differencing of the price series is used together with tests for autocorrelation. Another problem encountered is the nature of the available Soviet price data. If fixed state prices were analysed a high correlation coefficient might be expected, since the state sets these prices at a national level, but this would not mean that free or integrated markets existed in the capitalist sense. However, data are available for free, or private, markets in the USSR in the 1920s, published by bodies such as the Conjuncture Institute headed by N. D. Kondrat'ev. This was closed by the Soviet authorities towards the end of the 1920s, and thus should not be regarded as being politically biased in favour of the Soviet government. Such data were collected in good faith, and no problem arises regarding deliberate falsification for political ends, although this does not mean, of course, that the data are necessarily totally accurate. However, data for comparison are available from institutions such as Gosplan, and thus checks are possible. This investigation relates to what is usually taken to be the 'big issue' of NEP in the existing historiographical literature - the viability of a mixed economy alternative to Stalin's centrally planned industrialization policy. If no level of market integration is detected in the actual NEP economy, then an industrialization drive based on a mixed economy would have required much development of market infrastructure and culture. If, on the other hand, NEP markets were reasonably integrated, then some basic level of all-Union market infrastructure could be said to exist. This would have aided industrialization within the NEP framework. Of course, the question of whether integrated markets could have been politically acceptable to a Bolshevik leadership cannot be answered by the use of statistics. Section I tries to relate the concept of free markets to the USSR in the 1920s, while section II attempts to define a standard of comparison for correlation coefficients, and section III explores how geography might influence integration. The next section examines Soviet work on this topic written during NEP, after which section V presents an original statistical analysts of NEP price data, and section VI raises the question of the quantity of goods traded on free markets at this time. Since price data suitable for correlation analysis were difficult to locate, this article can only be a first step towards analysing NEP markets.

Research shows that analystsE target prices information produces a significant market reaction, both unconditionally and conditional based on earnings forecast revisions and recommendations on contemporaneously issued stock. Target prices projected one year ahead tend to be 28% higher than current market prices.