Knowledge and valuation in markets

By Patrik Aspers. 2009

125 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The purpose of this theoretical article is to contribute to the analysis of knowledge and valuation in markets. In every market actors must know how to value its products. The analytical point of departure is the distinction between two ideal types of markets that are mutually exclusive, status and standard. In a status market, valuation is a function of the status rank orders or identities of the actors on both sides of the market, which is more entrenched than the value of what is traded in the market. In a market characterized by a standard, the situation is reversed; the scale of value is more entrenched than the rankings of actors in the market. In a status market actors need to know about the other actors involved as there is no scale of value for evaluating the items traded in the market independently of its buyers and sellers. In a standard market it is more important to know how to meet the standard in relation to which all items traded are valued. The article includes empirical examples and four testable hypotheses.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Marketing, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67c8cf5df0a0b84bc3665efacb291ada9a02df38

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Citations in the corpus

Customer experience challenges: bringing together digital, physical and social realms (2018, background): “Networked market platforms (such as AirBnB, Uber or Vandebron) are comparable to “switch role markets” (Aspers, 2009), to indicate that actors can switch back and forth between enacting the role of the customer or service provider(s).”
A Market Mediation Strategy: How Social Movements Seek to Change Firms’ Practices by Promoting New Principles of Product Valuation (2013, background): “…Millo & Muniesa, 2007; Dubuisson-Quellier, 2010), to identify organizations able to take advantage of the coexistence of different regimes of worth (Stark, 2009) and to differentiate between different types of market based on the existence or not of a common scale for evaluation (Aspers, 2009).”
The Organization of Markets (2015, background): “There is a significant difference between switch-role markets and fixed-role markets (Aspers, 2009).”
Combinatorial Knowledge Dynamics: On the Usefulness of the Differentiated Knowledge Bases Model (2012, background): “See also Aspers (2009) for an interesting analysis of the role of knowledge, valuation and conventions of buyers and sellers on “standard” and “status” markets.”
Theorizing the Bioeconomy (2013, methodology): “That is, the political economy of the life sciences depends on the realization of value from financial and knowledge assets through exchange on markets that are not only characterized by social order and social structures, as Aspers (2007, 2009) argues, but also by social expectations.”
The impossibility of capitalist markets in higher education (2013, background): “First, status markets are constituted by both producer competition and competition between students for places in top institutions: ‘Two rank orders are generated, and not only one, as is the case if the consumers are an anonymous mass’ (Aspers 2009, 117).”