Where I am at the moment with this site: I’ve pretty much set up what I want it to look like, and what is going to go into it. What’s left is to figure out how to add content with consistency, and what to do with the art site, which is set up differently. Oh […]
Summary: An investigation into the history of risk as an economic concept and the origins of economic risk as part of the institutionalization of futures trading in the latter half of the 19th century US. Conceived with Marc Ventresca, this research shows how risk became a solution to a political (not economic) problem: how to […]
Summary: A research project originally conceived in collaboration with Wendy Espeland, looking at the creation of pollution allowances in Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. These allowances have become the demonstration project to show the effectiveness of market-based solutions to environmental problems. We show how the commodity was created, using commensuration as […]
Information, Prices, and Sensemaking. I’m trying to make sense of the underlying ontology of price, though I don’t call it that in this particular paper.
Summary: A study of the institutional change associated with the shift from open outcry to electronic trading in financial futures. I conducted an in-depth ethnography of a face-to-face trading organization, comparing it to 4 electronic trading firms. My key finding is that what appears to be a technological change in how traders make markets is […]
Futures Trading and Technological Change Where do Art Prices Come From? Pollution Markets and the EPA History of Risk
In reading Yuval Millo’s “Mechanics of Performativity”, I’m struck once again by the Black-Scholes notion of risk-free portfolios. There is a fundamental assumption, crossing a wide range of financial products (and, even as I’m venturing into the Art markets, economic reasoning there), about the relationship between risk and reward.