Where does market collide?

The arena in which buyers and sellers exchange goods and services and where their competing offers settle on a price. Adam Smith's 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations described the market as the place where self-interested trade, guided by the supply coming forward and the demand pulling it, sets prices and allocates resources, and Marshall's 1890 Principles of Economics later formalised this as the point where the schedules of supply and demand meet. The referent is an abstract price-forming mechanism defined by the meeting of buyers and sellers, and it is distinct from the network of mutually watching producers that a sociologist calls a market, or from the trading of goods and services between organisms that a biologist studies.[1][2]

Unit

One arena of exchange for a good, scaled by the volume traded and the price that clears it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Described by quantities traded, prices, and the elasticities of supply and demand estimated from transaction data

A market seen as a durable social structure rather than a bare price mechanism: a set of producers who fix their behaviour by watching one another and by the niches they hold in the eyes of buyers. Harrison White's 1981 Where do markets come from? argued that a production market is a self-reproducing role structure in which each firm finds its place by observing the volumes and revenues of its rivals, and Granovetter's 1985 account of embeddedness set such exchange within ongoing social relations and networks of trust. The referent is a concrete social formation of mutually observing actors, and it differs from the abstract clearing arena of economics and from the trading relationships between organisms in biology.[3][4]

Unit

One production market as a role structure among a set of mutually observing producers

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Traced through the network ties, market shares, and mutual signalling among firms observed in field and archival data

An exchange in nature in which organisms trade goods or services and in which the choice of partners sets the rate of exchange, as in a market. Noe and Hammerstein's 1994 Biological markets proposed that when members of one class can choose among partners of another class, supply and demand among those partners set how much each side must give, and that this shapes cooperation, mutualism, and mating. The referent is a pattern of trading and partner choice among living things, measured in biological currencies such as food, grooming, or protection, and it has nothing to do with the price arena of economics or the producer role structure of economic sociology beyond the shared word.[5]

Unit

One trading relationship between classes of organisms, scaled by the exchange rate that partner choice sets

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Quantified by the amounts of goods or services exchanged and by how exchange rates shift with the supply of available partners