Do Economists Make Markets?

On the Performativity of Economics

Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, Siu Leung-Sea, Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, Siu Leung-Sea, Lucia Siu

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780691138497
  9780691130163
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691214665
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Economics

Around the globe, economists affect markets by saying what markets are doing, what they should do, and what they will do. Increasingly, experimental economists are even designing real-world markets. But, despite these facts, economists are still largely thought of as scientists who merely observe markets from the outside, like astronomers look at the stars. Do Economists Make Markets? boldly challenges this view. It is the first book dedicated to the controversial question of whether economics is performative--of whether, in some cases, economics actually produces the phenomena it analyzes.


The book's case studies--including financial derivatives markets, telecommunications-frequency auctions, and individual transferable quotas in fisheries--give substance to the notion of the performativity of economics in an accessible, nontechnical way. Some chapters defend the notion; others attack it vigorously. The book ends with an extended chapter in which Michel Callon, the idea's main formulator, reflects upon the debate and asks what it means to say economics is performative.


The book's insights and strong claims about the ways economics is entangled with the markets it studies should interest--and provoke--economic sociologists, economists, and other social scientists.


In addition to the editors and Callon, the contributors include Marie-France Garcia-Parpet, Francesco Guala, Emmanuel Didier, Philip Mirowski, Edward Nik-Khah, Petter Holm, Vincent-Antonin Lépinay, and Timothy Mitchell.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations, Boxes, and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Social Construction of a Perfect Market: The Strawberry Auction at Fontaines-en-Sologne
• Chapter 3: Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivatives Markets
• Chapter 4: Decoding Finance: Articulation and Liquidity around a Trading Room
• Chapter 5: How to Do Things with Experimental Economics
• Chapter 6: Economic Experiments and the Construction of Markets
• Chapter 7: Markets Made Flesh: Performativity, and a Problem in Science Studies, Augmented with Consideration of the FCC Auctions
• Chapter 8: Which Way Is Up on Callon?
• Chapter 9: The Properties of Markets
• Chapter 10: Do Statistics “Perform” the Economy?
• Chapter 11: What Does It Mean to Say That Economics Is Performative?
• List of Contributors
• Index