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This article identifies the concept of market value as a standardizing concept that coordinates the actions of market participants in relatively inefficient real estate markets. The paper also identifies different levels of discourse that reflect the organizational/institutional complexity of the real estate appraisal profession. The standardizing effect of market value includes a cognitive and fiduciary component. Using this framework, the paper traces the influence of Richard T. Ely’s institutional economics – and its legacy in the form of the research program of Urban Land Economics at the University of Wisconsin – on the formation and development of the standards of appraisal and ethical practice. This complexity is traced historically from the early part of the 19th century to the formation of the professional organizations and the establishment of their standards, and also through a series of reform efforts in the 1960s and 1980s that were articulated in the academic community. The paper illustrates the manner in which Institutional Economics has been influential in the continuing development of the real estate appraisal profession and suggests reasons for its continuing relevance.

Operating as a promising regional university well into the 1960s, Stanford witnessed a “great leap forward” in the 1970s and 1980s. Guided by the visionary leadership of its president, Wallace Sterling, and provost, Frederick Terman, Stanford began its meteoric climb into the ranks of the nation's top tier universities. This more general history has been told and retold in numerous publications (e.g., Lowen, 1997; Gillmor, 2004) and need not be recounted here.

Prior to the passage of the 20th amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, several states had extended the suffrage to women. Helen Laura Sumner (later Woodbury), a student of John R. Commons at Wisconsin, undertook a statistical study of the political, economic, and social impacts of the granting of voting rights to women in the state of Colorado, and subsequently defended the results against numerous attacks. In this paper, we present a brief account of the struggle for women’s equality in the extension of the suffrage and examine Sumner’s critical analysis of the evidence as to its effects, as well as the counterarguments to which she responded.