Mitchel Y. Abolafia is Professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York. He has taught at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management and MIT’s Sloan School of Management and is the author of Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street.

[This is] a great must-read. Abolafia’s central thesis is that markets cannot be viewed simply as anonymous fora where nameless economic forces work their mysterious ways to determine equilibrium price-quantity outcomes. Instead, they are better seen as stages on which diverse groups of actors seek to further their own, often conflicting, interests… The view that markets are social constructs has a particularly significant consequence for understanding and reacting to the phenomenon of manipulation. Abolafia’s view that manipulation ‘arises out of a conflict between buyers and sellers where one side is pressing its advantage’, rather than being either a legal definition or an economic phenomenon, is extremely convincing… It is impossibly infuriating that one’s assumptions about how the financial world works should be overturned by a mere sociologist.

• Introduction: Market Makers on Wall Street 1. Homo Economicus Unbound: Bond Traders on Wall Street 2. Structured Anarchy: Formal and Informal Organization in the Futures Market 3. Taming the Market: Conflict Resolution among Market Makers 4. Responding to External Threats 5. Homo Economicus Restrained: Identity and Control at the New York Stock Exchange 6. Coping with the Threat of Extinction 7. Opportunism and Innovation: An Interpretation of the Milken Drama 8. Cycles of Opportunism: Profits, Prudence, and the Public Interest Notes Index

Mitchel Y. Abolafia is Professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York. He has taught at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management and MIT’s Sloan School of Management and is the author of Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street.

[This is] a great must-read. Abolafia’s central thesis is that markets cannot be viewed simply as anonymous fora where nameless economic forces work their mysterious ways to determine equilibrium price-quantity outcomes. Instead, they are better seen as stages on which diverse groups of actors seek to further their own, often conflicting, interests… The view that markets are social constructs has a particularly significant consequence for understanding and reacting to the phenomenon of manipulation. Abolafia’s view that manipulation ‘arises out of a conflict between buyers and sellers where one side is pressing its advantage’, rather than being either a legal definition or an economic phenomenon, is extremely convincing… It is impossibly infuriating that one’s assumptions about how the financial world works should be overturned by a mere sociologist.

• Introduction: Market Makers on Wall Street 1. Homo Economicus Unbound: Bond Traders on Wall Street 2. Structured Anarchy: Formal and Informal Organization in the Futures Market 3. Taming the Market: Conflict Resolution among Market Makers 4. Responding to External Threats 5. Homo Economicus Restrained: Identity and Control at the New York Stock Exchange 6. Coping with the Threat of Extinction 7. Opportunism and Innovation: An Interpretation of the Milken Drama 8. Cycles of Opportunism: Profits, Prudence, and the Public Interest Notes Index

Mitchel Y. Abolafia is Professor at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany, State University of New York. He has taught at Cornell’s Johnson School of Management and MIT’s Sloan School of Management and is the author of Making Markets: Opportunism and Restraint on Wall Street.

[This is] a great must-read. Abolafia’s central thesis is that markets cannot be viewed simply as anonymous fora where nameless economic forces work their mysterious ways to determine equilibrium price-quantity outcomes. Instead, they are better seen as stages on which diverse groups of actors seek to further their own, often conflicting, interests… The view that markets are social constructs has a particularly significant consequence for understanding and reacting to the phenomenon of manipulation. Abolafia’s view that manipulation ‘arises out of a conflict between buyers and sellers where one side is pressing its advantage’, rather than being either a legal definition or an economic phenomenon, is extremely convincing… It is impossibly infuriating that one’s assumptions about how the financial world works should be overturned by a mere sociologist.

• Introduction: Market Makers on Wall Street 1. Homo Economicus Unbound: Bond Traders on Wall Street 2. Structured Anarchy: Formal and Informal Organization in the Futures Market 3. Taming the Market: Conflict Resolution among Market Makers 4. Responding to External Threats 5. Homo Economicus Restrained: Identity and Control at the New York Stock Exchange 6. Coping with the Threat of Extinction 7. Opportunism and Innovation: An Interpretation of the Milken Drama 8. Cycles of Opportunism: Profits, Prudence, and the Public Interest Notes Index