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Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

This chapter examines the price impact of large trades in futures markets across 14 stock index futures contracts in 11 different international markets. On the balance, we find that part of the initial price effect of futures trades is temporary. These initial price effects are partially reversed, implying that they incur a liquidity premium; though there is some variation in this finding across markets. We also find strong evidence that large buyer- and seller-initiated trades have positive and negative permanent effects on prices, implying they convey information. We conclude, similar to research based on equities markets, that traders in futures markets are informed.

This paper examines secondary equity offerings that were done in the Canadian markets through “installment receipts” (IRs). Previous studies on seasoned equity offerings tend to focus on the price reaction around the announcement date. We extend the analysis to cover a longer period so that the issues of liquidity effect and information asymmetry can be adequately addressed. We also offer evidence to indicate that the use of IRs in secondary offerings can reduce the liquidity impact in markets where market depth is not as substantial as in the U.S.

This study investigates whether block acquisitions lead to changes in board and CEO compensation characteristics and finds that block purchasers do not play a significant role in improving the firm’s governance practices. However, the majority of professional investors have sold their block within a year, suggesting that they do not own their stock long enough to alter governance policies nor to benefit from such changes. For the smaller number of firms where a new blockholder maintains their investment for more than a year, the use of equity based CEO compensation increases while the use of cash based compensation decreases.

The Noise Upstairs (NU) is a monthly freely improvised (‘free improv’) music night with a home above a café bar in a mixed/student suburb of Manchester. This chapter uses the perspective of critical improvisation studies to reflect on aspects of a performance ethnography carried out by the authors, both of whom are performers and one of whom (Hunter) curates the NU night for the NU collective. Free improv is a post-1960s set of meta-musical practices related to but contesting both ‘jazz’, ‘free jazz’, ‘new music’ and ‘experimental’ music. In it, real-time co-creation and negotiation of social-and-musical relationships are paramount. Consequently, the question of whether a politics of sorts is enacted in the dialogic and multilateral socialities generated in free improv is a substantive one. In addressing it, the authors deploy some concepts from the ‘affective turn’ in social theory to review how the general milieu and out-of-the-hat ensemble-formation approach adopted at NU in fact enables a ‘minor’ micro-political practice of participating differently to be established there. Arising from that discussion, and in line with a key theme of the wider PARTISPACE study, the authors then discuss whether that politics might meaningfully (and usefully) be articulated in terms of ‘democracy’.

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to investigate whether and to what extent economic transactions are influenced by social structures, power distributions, and cultural understandings through an analysis of exchange at a scrap metal yard in Chicago.

Methodology/Approach – Between March 2000 and December 2002, 72 interviews were conducted with collectors who bring metal to City Iron. With 16 of these collectors the author had a working relationship, assisting the collector in all aspects of the job. Data were coded and analyzed with the assistance of NVIVO, a qualitative data management program.

Findings – The author finds that market transactions are not impersonal and that moral characterizations matter. In this universally risky business in which some level of in-market cheating is expected, material and moral appraisals become intertwined as participants look to extra-market cues and clues in evaluating with whom to transact and how. While the ascription of ethnicity serves as a proxy for the particularistic judgment of trustworthiness, this sorting is accomplished and legitimated by an ostensibly universal moral discourse. Actors evaluate each other using a moral yardstick, paying as much – if not more – attention to what one believes the other is doing when not working as to when one is.

Originality/Value of paper – By focusing on exchange-in-interaction and articulating how economic transactions are culturally embedded, this research contributes to scholarship in the sociologies of work and economies, and provides a glimpse into an understudied work world.