Comment on “The Complex Market: Communications of Exchange, Observing Competitors, and Prices” by Pascal Goeke and Evelyn Moser/2. Real Agents in Real Markets: Socio-Cognitive Scaffolds that “Reduce” Market Uncertainty

Abstract

This paper discusses the work by Pascal Goeke and Evelyn Moser (2018), which provided a remarkable contribution to the study of modern markets. The Authors debated four sociological approaches to markets, i.e. interaction, network, institutions and performativity-based arguments, to elaborate a new comprehensive definition of market as tension between noise and order. In this regards, I argue that their theorizing calls for further empirical analysis. Their “over-socialized” perspective should consider both the bounded rationality of real agents and the context-dependency of markets in more detail, given that economic action is shaped by structural, institutional and cultural forms of embeddedness. The paper raises the importance of a more “integrative research”, in order to combine the deductive approach provided by Goeke and Moser and inductive research on real markets and real actors.