Is the growth of modern financial risk management a result of the accuracy and reliability of risk models? This paper argues that the remarkable success of today's financial risk management methods should be attributed primarily to their communicative and organizational usefulness and less to...

In 1999, Carruthers and Stinchcombe provided the classic discussion of ‘the social structure of liquidity’: the institutional arrangements that support markets in which ‘exchange occurs easily and frequently’. Our argument in this paper is that the material aspects of these arrangements...

Over the last three decades, most face-to-face financial markets have shifted to electronic trading. Since around 2000, many markets have made the further transition to automated trading, including ultrafast, algorithmic high-frequency trading, or HFT. This chapter applies a perspective that the...

This paper analyses the development of carbon markets: markets in permits to emit greenhouse gases or in credits earned by not emitting them. It describes briefly how such markets have come into being, and discusses in more detail two aspects of the efforts to 'make things the same' in carbon...

Formal verification is the attempt to give a mathematical proof that the design of a computer system is a correct implementation of its specification. This effort raises questions about what ‘proof’ is. Two main conceptions — formal proof and rigorous argument — are identified, and it is...

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...

Bringing transactions to an end constitutes a crucial stage of market activity: the detachment between the counterparties engaged in a trade must be guaranteed. In financial markets, this operation relies on organisational technologies, such as clearinghouses, that can reach a high degree of...