This analysis of the origins and development of a key financial derivatives market, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, suggests that social interaction in such markets generates trust, permits solution of collective action problems, and affects pricing. The growing cognitive complexity of...

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...

We study the influence of the corporate board network on executive pay for 3,395 US firms over the period from 1990 to 2015. Drawing on structural anthropology and social exchange theory, we identify three elementary structures through which the interlocking network captures an obvious form of...