Market (economics)

In economics, a market is a composition of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations or infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services (including labour power) to buyers in exchange for money. It can be said that a market is the process by which the prices of goods and services are established. Markets facilitate trade and enable the distribution and allocation of resources in a society. Markets allow any tradeable item to be evaluated and priced. A market emerges more or less spontaneously or may be constructed deliberately by human interaction in order to enable the exchange of rights (cf. ownership) of services and goods. Markets generally supplant gift economies and are often held in place through rules and customs, such as a booth fee, competitive pricing, and source of goods for sale (local produce or stock registration).

Markets can differ by products (goods, services) or factors (labour and capital) sold, product differentiation, place in which exchanges are carried, buyers targeted, duration, selling process, government regulation, taxes, subsidies, minimum wages, price ceilings, legality of exchange, liquidity, intensity of speculation, size, concentration, exchange asymmetry, relative prices, volatility and geographic extension. The geographic boundaries of a market may vary considerably, for example the food market in a single building, the real estate market in a local city, the consumer market in an entire country, or the economy of an international trade bloc where the same rules apply throughout. Markets can also be worldwide, see for example the global diamond trade. National economies can also be classified as developed markets or developing markets.

In mainstream economics, the concept of a market is any structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange any type of goods, services and information. The exchange of goods or services, with or without money, is a transaction. Market participants consist of all the buyers and sellers of a good who influence its price, which is a major topic of study of economics and has given rise to several theories and models concerning the basic market forces of supply and demand. A major topic of debate is how much a given market can be considered to be a "free market", that is free from government intervention. Microeconomics traditionally focuses on the study of market structure and the efficiency of market equilibrium; when the latter (if it exists) is not efficient, then economists say that a market failure has occurred. However, it is not always clear how the allocation of resources can be improved since there is always the possibility of government failure.

Definition

In economics, a market is a coordinating mechanism that uses prices to convey information among economic entities (such as firms, households and individuals) to regulate production and distribution. In his seminal 1937 article " The Nature of the Firm", Ronald Coase wrote: "An economist thinks of the economic system as being coordinated by the price mechanism....in economic theory we find that the allocation of factors of production between different uses is determined by the price mechanism". Thus the usage of the price mechanism to convey information is the defining feature of the market. This is in contrast to a firm, which as Coase put it, "the distinguishing mark of the firm is the super-session of the price mechanism".

Thus, Firms and Markets are two opposite forms of organizing production; Coase wrote:

There are also other hybrid forms of coordinating mechanisms, in between the hierarchical firm and price-coordinating market(e.g. global value chains, Business Ventures, Joint Venture, and strategic alliances).

The reasons for the existence of firms or other forms of co-ordinating mechanisms of production and distribution alongside the market are studied in "The Theory of the Firm" literature, with various complete and incomplete contract theories trying to explain the existence of the firm. Incomplete contract theories that are explicitly based on bounded rationality lead to the costs of writing complete contracts. Such theories include: Transaction Cost Economies by Oliver Williamson and Residual Rights Theory by Groomsman, Hart, and Moore.

Market-Firms's dichotomy can be contrasted with the relationship between the agents transacting. While in a market the relationship is short term and restricted to the contract, in the case of firms and other co-ordinating mechanisms it is for a longer duration.

In the modern world much economic activity takes place through fiat and not the market. Lafontaine and Slade (2007) estimates, in the US, that the total value added in transactions inside the firms equal the total value added of all market transactions. Similarly, 80% of all World Trade is conducted under Global Value Chains (2012 estimate), while 33% (1996 estimate) is intra-firm trade. Nearly 50% of US imports and 30% of exports take place within firms. While Rajan and Zingales (1998) have found that in 43 countries two-thirds of the growth in value added between 1980 and 1990 came from increase in firm size.

Types

A market is one of the many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services (including labour) in exchange for money from buyers. It can be said that a market is the process by which the prices of goods and services are established. Markets facilitate trade and enable the distribution and allocation of resources in a society. Markets allow any trade-able item to be evaluated and priced. A market sometimes emerges more or less spontaneously or may be constructed deliberately by human interaction in order to enable the exchange of rights (cf. ownership) of services and goods.

Markets of varying types can spontaneously arise whenever a party has interest in a good or service that some other party can provide. Hence there can be a market for cigarettes in correctional facilities, another for chewing gum in a playground, and yet another for contracts for the future delivery of a commodity. There can be black markets, where a good is exchanged illegally, for example markets for goods under a command economy despite pressure to repress them and virtual markets, such as eBay, in which buyers and sellers do not physically interact during negotiation. A market can be organized as an auction, as a private electronic market, as a commodity wholesale market, as a shopping center, as complex institutions such as international markets and as an informal discussion between two individuals.

Markets vary in form, scale (volume and geographic reach), location and types of participants as well as the types of goods and services traded. The following is a non exhaustive list:

Physical consumer markets

* Food retail markets: farmers' markets, fish markets, wet markets and grocery stores
* Retail marketplaces: public markets, market squares, Main Streets, High Streets, bazaars, souqs, night markets, shopping strip malls and shopping malls
* Big-box stores: supermarkets, hypermarkets and discount stores
* ''Ad hoc'' auction markets: process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids and then selling the item to the highest bidder
* Used goods markets such as flea markets
* Temporary markets such as fairs
* Real estate markets

Physical business markets

* Physical wholesale markets: sale of goods or merchandise to retailers; to industrial, commercial, institutional, or other professional business users or to other wholesalers and related subordinated services
* Markets for intermediate goods used in production of other goods and services
* Labour markets: where people sell their labour to businesses in exchange for a wage
* Online auctions and ''Ad hoc'' auction markets: process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids and then selling the item to the highest bidder
* Temporary markets such as trade fairs
* Energy markets

Non-physical markets

* Media markets (broadcast market): is a region where the population can receive the same (or similar) television and radio station offerings and may also include other types of media including newspapers and Internet content
* Internet markets ( electronic commerce): trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet
* Artificial markets created by regulation to exchange rights for derivatives that have been designed to ameliorate externalities, such as pollution permits (see carbon trading)

Financial markets

Financial markets facilitate the exchange of liquid assets. Most investors prefer investing in two markets:
* The stock markets, for the exchange of shares in corporations (NYSE, AMEX and the NASDAQ are the most common stock markets in the United States)
* The bond markets

There are also:
* Currency markets are used to trade one currency for another, and are often used for speculation on currency exchange rates
* The money market is the name for the global market for lending and borrowing
* Futures markets, where contracts are exchanged regarding the future delivery of goods are often an outgrowth of general commodity markets
* Prediction markets are a type of speculative market in which the goods exchanged are futures on the occurrence of certain events; they apply the market dynamics to facilitate information aggregation
* Insurance markets
* Debt markets

Unauthorized and illegal markets

* Grey markets (parallel markets): is the trade of a commodity through distribution channels which, while legal, are unofficial, unauthorized, or unintended by the original manufacturer
* markets in illegal goods such as the market for illicit drugs, illegal arms, infringing products, cigarettes sold to minors or untaxed cigarettes (in some jurisdictions), or the private sale of un pasteurized goat milk

Mechanisms

In economics, a market that runs under laissez-faire policies is called a free market, it is "free" from the government, in the sense that the government makes no attempt to intervene through taxes, subsidies, minimum wages, price ceilings and so on. However, market prices may be distorted by a seller or sellers with monopoly power, or a buyer with monopsony power. Such price distortions can have an adverse effect on market participant's welfare and reduce the efficiency of market outcomes. The relative level of organization and negotiating power of buyers and sellers also markedly affects the functioning of the market.

Markets are a system and systems have structure. The structure of a well-functioning market is defined by the theory of perfect competition. Well-functioning markets of the real world are never perfect, but basic structural characteristics can be approximated for real world markets, for example:
* Many small buyers and sellers
* Buyers and sellers have equal access to information
* Products are comparable

Markets where price negotiations meet equilibrium, but the equilibrium is not efficient are said to experience market failure. Market failures are often associated with time-inconsistent preferences, information asymmetries, non-perfectly competitive markets, principal–agent problems, externalities, or public goods. Among the major negative externalities which can occur as a side effect of production and market exchange, are air pollution (side-effect of manufacturing and logistics) and environmental degradation (side-effect of farming and urbanization).

There exists a popular thought, especially among economists, that free markets would have a structure of a perfect competition. The logic behind this thought is that market failure is thought to be caused by other exogenic systems, and after removing those exogenic systems ("freeing" the markets) the free markets could run without market failures. For a market to be competitive, there must be more than a single buyer or seller. It has been suggested that two people may trade, but it takes at least three persons to have a market so that there is competition in at least one of its two sides. However, competitive markets—as understood in formal economic theory—rely on much larger numbers of both buyers and sellers. A market with a single seller and multiple buyers is a monopoly. A market with a single buyer and multiple sellers is a monopsony. These are "the polar opposites of perfect competition". As an argument against such logic, there is a second view that suggests that the source of market failures is inside the market system itself, therefore the removal of other interfering systems would not result in markets with a structure of perfect competition. As an analogy, such an argument may suggest that capitalists do not want to enhance the structure of markets, just like a coach of a football team would influence the referees or would break the rules if he could while he is pursuing his target of winning the game. Thus, according to this view, capitalists are not enhancing the balance of their team versus the team of consumer- workers, so the market system needs a "referee" from outside that balances the game. In this second framework, the role of a "referee" of the market system is usually to be given to a democratic government.

Research

Disciplines such as sociology, economic history, economic geography and marketing developed novel understandings of markets studying actual existing markets made up of persons interacting in diverse ways in contrast to an abstract and all-encompassing concepts of "the market". The term "the market" is generally used in two ways:
# "The market" denotes the abstract mechanisms whereby supply and demand confront each other and deals are made; in its place, reference to markets reflects ordinary experience and the places, processes and institutions in which exchanges occurs
# "The market" signifies an integrated, all-encompassing and cohesive capitalist world economy.

Economics

Political economy

Economics used to be called political economy, as Adam Smith defined it in The Wealth of Nations:

The earliest works of political economy are usually attributed to the British scholars Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, although they were preceded by the work of the French physiocrats, such as François Quesnay (1694–1774) and Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781). Smith describes how exchange of goods arose:

And explains how exchanged mediated by money came to dominate the market:

Microeconomics

Microeconomics (from Greek prefix ''mikro''- meaning "small" and economics) is a branch of economics that studies the behavior of individuals and small impacting organizations in making decisions on the allocation of limited resources (see scarcity). On the other hand, macroeconomics (from the Greek prefix ''makro''- meaning "large" and economics) is a branch of economics dealing with the performance, structure, behavior and decision-making of an economy as a whole, rather than individual markets.

=Marginal revolution

=

The modern field of microeconomics arose as an effort of neoclassical economics school of thought to put economic ideas into mathematical mode. It began in the 19th century debates surrounding the works of Antoine Augustin Cournot, William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger and Léon Walras—this period is usually denominated as the Marginal Revolution. A recurring theme of these debates was the contrast between the labor theory of value and the subjective theory of value, the former being associated with classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx (Marx was a contemporary of the marginalists). A labour theory of value can be understood as a theory that argues that economic value is determined by the amount of socially necessary labour time while a subjective theory of value derives economic value from subjective preferences, usually by specifying a utility function in accordance with utilitarian philosophy.

In his '' Principles of Economics'' (1890),A. Marshall, ''Principles of Economics'', 1890 Alfred Marshall presented a possible solution to this problem, using the supply and demand model. Marshall's idea of solving the controversy was that the demand curve could be derived by aggregating individual consumer demand curves, which were themselves based on the consumer problem of maximizing utility. The supply curve could be derived by superimposing a representative firm supply curves for the factors of production and then market equilibrium (economic equivalent of mechanical equilibrium) would be given by the intersection of demand and supply curves. He also introduced the notion of different market periods: mainly long run and short run. This set of ideas gave way to what economists call perfect competition—now found in the standard microeconomics texts, even though Marshall himself was highly skeptical it could be used as general model of all markets.

=Market structure

=

Opposed to the model of perfect competition, some models of imperfect competition were proposed:
* The monopoly model, already considered by marginalist economists, describes a profit maximizing capitalist facing a market demand curve with no competitors, who may practice price discrimination.
* Oligopoly is a market form in which a market or industry is dominated by a small number of sellers. The oldest model was the spring water duopoly of Cournot (1838) in which equilibrium is determined by the duopolists reactions functions. It was criticized by Harold Hotelling for its instability, by Joseph Bertrand for lacking equilibrium for prices as independent variables.
* Monopolistic competition is a type of imperfect competition such that many producers sell products that are differentiated from one another (e.g., by branding or quality) and hence are not perfect substitutes. In monopolistic competition, a firm takes the prices charged by its rivals as given and ignores the impact of its own prices on the prices of other firms. The "founding father" of the theory of monopolistic competition is Edward Hastings Chamberlin, who wrote a pioneering book on the subject, ''Theory of Monopolistic Competition'' (1933). Joan Robinson published a book called ''The Economics of Imperfect Competition'' with a comparable theme of distinguishing perfect from imperfect competition. Chamberlin defined monopolistic competition as "challenge to traditional viewpoint of economics that competition and monopoly are alternatives and that individual prices are to be explained in terms of one or the other". He continues: "By contrast it is held that most economic situations are composite of both competition and monopoly, and that, wherever this is the case, a false view is given by neglecting either one of the two forces and regarding the situation as made up entirely of the other". Hotelling built a model of market located over a line with two sellers in each extreme of the line, in this case maximizing profit for both sellers leads to a stable equilibrium. From this model also follows that if a seller is to choose the location of his store so as to maximize his profit, he will place his store the closest to his competitor as "the sharper competition with his rival is offset by the greater number of buyers he has an advantage". He also argues that clustering of stores is wasteful from the point of view of transportation costs and that public interest would dictate more spatial dispersion.
* William Baumol provided in his 1977 paper the current formal definition of a natural monopoly where “an industry in which multifirm production is more costly than production by a monopoly”.
* Baumol defined a contestable market in his 1982 paper as a market where "entry is absolutely free and exit absolutely costless", freedom of entry in Stigler sense: the incumbent has no cost discrimination against entrants. He states that a contestable market will never have an economic profit greater than zero when in equilibrium and the equilibrium will also be efficient. According to Baumol, this equilibrium emerges endogenously due to the nature of contestable markets; that is, the only industry structure that survives in the long run is the one which minimizes total costs. This is in contrast to the older theory of industry structure since not only is industry structure not exogenously given, but equilibrium is reached without an ad hoc hypothesis on the behavior of firms, say using reaction functions in a duopoly. He concludes the paper commenting that regulators that seek to impede entry and/or exit of firms would do better to not interfere if the market in question resembles a contestable market.

=Market failure

=

Around the 1970s the study of market failures came into focus with the study of information asymmetry. In particular, three authors emerged from this period: Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz. Akerlof considered the problem of bad quality cars driving good quality cars out of the market in his classic " The Market for Lemons" (1970) because of the presence of asymmetrical information between buyers and sellers. Michael Spence explained that signaling was fundamental in the labour market since employers can't know beforehand which candidate is the most productive, a college degree becomes a signaling device that a firm uses to select new personnel. Stiglitz provided some general conditions under which market equilibrium is not efficient: presence of externalities, imperfect information and incomplete markets.

=State interference

=

C. B. Macpherson identifies an underlying model of the market underlying Anglo-American liberal democratic political economy and philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: persons are cast as self-interested individuals, who enter into contractual relations with other such individuals, concerning the exchange of goods or personal capacities cast as commodities, with the motive of maximizing pecuniary