Peter Levin’s Rethinking Markets

June 25, 2007

Does Information-mining displace decision-making?

Filed under: Daily — Peter @ 11:00 pm

A number of tools are around to improve decision-making by providing information. The latest, announced by IBM, is “stream computing“, a somewhat mysterious-sounding technology that aims to improve the performance of single-threaded applications on multi-core chips. The seemingly most important application is that stream computing can aid in analyzing digital data as it comes into a database, rather than waiting for it to be stored. It’s an improvement in data-mining, the idea being that you don’t have to wait to analyze data - you can do it in real-time. Think search-engines, and more interestingly, think financial services.

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June 15, 2007

Beyond physics and the economic molecule

Filed under: Daily — Peter @ 10:39 am

Daniel and Yuval’s posts at SocFinance continue to be very important to me, with Daniel’s latest striking a particular chord. I agree quite a bit with the sensibility of his post. Over and again, there are questions about the ‘organic’-ness of markets, can they be designed if they are found in nature. This was rehearsed recently in its last iteration at Organizations and Markets, and referenced by Braydenbut occurs quite regularly. I think the idea of the ‘natural’ (and here is part of the epistemic baggage I’d like to drop) and its relation to ‘discovering’ versus ‘creating’ that I’d like to get away from.

For myself, the Cronon (Nature’s Metropolis) is so interesting and useful not just for his discussion about grades and wheat, but for his overall contention that ‘nature’ is not natural but the result of strident human assertive activity. So now we have the Vermont Land Trust and assorted similar entities, whose purpose is to “conserve land for the people of Vermont.” But how did that farm become the correct nature to preserve? Cronon points out that there was vast pre-farm land in the Midwest (where I grew up and went on fieldtrips as a kid to attest to the history of our ‘place’) that didn’t resemble farm at all - it was prairie.

This is why conversations about whether or not markets can be designed, and actually the metaphor of molecules for economic actors, becomes so challenging to me. It’s like replacing prairie with farmland. Truth is, there are no social greenfields - and the reason we’re stuck with physics, and molecules, and natural, is because economists use it to great effect in order to justify all sorts of privilege.

As to Daniel’s challenging and thoughtful question of if not molecules and physics, then what? Let me start by responding with some questioning parameters of my own. Do we need something non-nature-like? Or just non-physics-like? Prosthetics, from disability studies, has its own sense, but I’m not sure that’s quite it. But it should be something that decisively knocks people off the axis of thinking about the core rational agent with stuff built on, but outside of her. I don’t mind nature as such for metaphor (Mary Douglas reminds us they are likely to be the most powerful metaphors), but I agree this is what we should be thinking about.

June 11, 2007

Where do Art Prices Come From?

Filed under: Art — Peter @ 10:37 pm

Summary: A study of the ontology of art prices. Art specialists act as market intermediaries who do the important work of making prices know-able. This project consists of two pieces, a quantitative analysis of the relationship between auction estimates and final prices, and a qualitative analysis of interviews with art specialists, private art advisers, and appraisers associated with the Internal Revenue Service.

This project was, in its first iteration, the subject of a research seminar I taught at Barnard College. The members of that seminar were: Whitney Wilson, Jessica Katz, Jessica Blanco, Lena Kim, Cara Ciani-Nangle, Jane Cooper, Michelle Lu, Juliette Premmereur, Emily Luski, and Maria Baibakova. Thank you for your support, you were the most interesting class I’ve taught at Barnard.

June 7, 2007

Categorical Commensuration

Filed under: Daily — Peter @ 3:09 pm

One of the claims about commensuration is that it helps to resolve comparative issues by transforming quality into quantity. The art project I’m working on challenges this pretty fundamentally.

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June 5, 2007

$40 Million

Filed under: Daily — Peter @ 2:30 pm

I read in June’s issue of Art News that Steve Wynn seems to have dropped his lawsuit with Lloyd’s of London over Le Rêve. If you’ll remember, this is the painting Mr. Wynn popped an elbow through while showing it to friends. His claim, interestingly enough, is that this reduced the value of the painting by $54 million dollars. It turns on the fact that he apparently had a private agreement to sell the painting for $135 million the day before the accident.

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Orthogonal thinking

Filed under: Daily — Peter @ 9:59 am

One of the more insidious elements of commensuration is the normative push to treat what were qualitative differences as differences of common degree. For an organization engaged in a competitive marketplace, or a competitive reputational field more generally, this can be a problem.

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