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This paper presents a new reason why countries may want to keep separate currencies rather than form a currency union. In a search model of a two-country world, keeping multiple currencies with trade restrictions that favor the use of the domestic currency in domestic goods markets is socially beneficial relative to forming a currency union or letting multiple currencies circulate in all countries without restrictions. Multiple currencies improve the allocation of liquidity in the presence of trading frictions that make the use of currencies necessary to exchange commodities.

Assessing the fundamental value of a wide range of asset-backed securities is costly. As a result, these assets can become information insensitive, which allows them to be used as collateral in credit transactions. In this paper, we show that while it is true that information-insensitive assets can play a liquidity role, the fact that they play this role reinforces their information insensitivity. This implies that the availability of alternative ways of financing can harm the liquidity role of assets, even if these alternatives are costly and not used in equilibrium. The reason is that such options raise the asset's sensitivity to information by increasing the relative importance of their fundamental value vis-a-vis their role as collateral.

This paper examines a search model of money and public bonds in which coordination frictions lead to multiple, Pareto ranked equilibria. Whether money and bonds are substitutes or complements, is not a primitive of the economy, but an equilibrium outcome. There exists an equilibrium resembling a liquidity trap, in which money and bonds are perfect substitutes, interest rates are zero, and monetary policy is ineffective; and a superior equilibrium in which money and bonds are complements, interest rates are positive and monetary policy has a liquidity effect. On this view, the liquidity trap is a belief-driven phenomenon.

We investigate the effects of a credit crunch in an economy where firms can retain a mature technology or adopt a new technology. We show that firms' collateral eases firms' access to credit and investment but can also inhibit firms' innovation. When this occurs, a contraction in the price of collateral assets squeezes collateral-poor firms out of the credit market but fosters the innovation of collateral-rich firms. The analysis reveals that the credit and asset market policies adopted during recent credit market crises can boost investment but slow down innovation. We find that the predictions of the model are consistent with the innovation patterns of a large sample of European firms during the 2008-2010 credit crisis.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the participation practices of stakeholder networks inform an understanding of context functioning in complex service exchange settings. We adapt the concept of the service delivery network (SDN) as a suitable approach to investigate how context is made within collaborative healthcare projects. Case management reviews in a UK Learning Disability service are the focus of study as an area of significant practical interest, and as suitable exemplars of healthcare case management. Based on a template analysis, we describe the SDN related to stakeholder participation and co-participation at the intersection of patient, commissioner and clinician networks. We identify notable variations to SDN profiles and degrees of participation of the different stakeholder networks involved. Our findings suggest a fresh focus for researching complex service settings and for case management practice. We discuss the impact of this perspective for understanding and researching context functioning and developing service theory based on mid-range empirical studies.

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo presentar la experiencia de visita a la ciudad de Sao Lourenco (MG, Brasil), teniendo como foco el uso de animales en la actividad turistica. El trabajo trae una breve discusion de moral y etica, y propone, ademas de cambios en la vision del Estado sobre el animal, la construccion de una nueva etica para el turismo. Para eso, se realizo una investigacion descriptiva con estudio de caso y analisis documental, viabilizada por una vision participante, con insercion del investigador en la realidad presentada. Se espera que cada visitante pueda volver a ver sus conceptos en relacion a la utilizacion del uso de charretes en localidades turisticas y que, a partir de tal hecho, proponga una moral constituyente que se transforme en moral constituida.

The essentiality of money is commonly justified on efficiency grounds, i.e., money achieves socially desirable allocations which could not be achieved by alternative technologies of exchange. In this paper we argue that what makes money achieve such allocations is its ability to overcome coordination frictions. Intuitively, the fact that money is a permanent record of past production implies that an agent is willing to produce in exchange for money even if he believes that many of his future partners will not accept money.

Macrophages are one of the most versatile cells of the immune system that can express distinct subtypes and functions depending on the physiological challenge. After skeletal muscle damage, inflammatory macrophage subtypes aid muscles to regenerate and are implicated in physical training adaption. Based on this information, this study aimed to evaluate two classic mice macrophage subtypes and determine whether some inflammatory cytokines might be involved in the muscle adaption process after exercise. For this purpose, mice were exposed to an intermittent experimental protocol of downhill exercise (18 bouts of running, each bout 5 min with a 2-min rest interval, slope -16°) and were euthanized before [control (CTRL)] and 1, 2 (D2), and 3 (D3) days after exercise. After euthanasia, the triceps brachii was harvested and submitted to protein extraction, immunostaining, and mononuclear digestion procedures. The muscle size, macrophage accumulation, and cytokines were determined. We observed an increase in the Ly6C

This paper questions the assumption in much of the marketing and product-service literature that products can be treated as stable platforms for the delivery of services. Instead, it uses the notion of the product biography to argue that products are chronically unstable, both physically and institutionally, and focusses on the managerial and institutional effort required to temporarily stabilise and qualify products for exchange or service value-creation. The context of the circular economy, which presents particularly acute challenges of qualification, is used to stimulate insights into how the product biography approach can inform the servitization debate. In particular, the circular economy perspective emphasises the need to see products as qualified by and constitutive of a distributed network, rather than defined once and for all by their producer, and points to entrepreneurial opportunity in the moments of transition between singularised, unique specimens and general, commodified, manageable objects – and vice versa. The wider and multiple product biographies occasioned by the circular economy also lead to reconfiguration of networks, as new potential valuations give rise to new entrepreneurial spaces.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide an historical account of the evolution of the purchasing and supply management (PSM) field from the perspective of resource interfaces between buying firms and their suppliers. This historical account is then used as a platform to develop a framework for understanding of the capabilities required to manage a cluster of resource interfaces. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses an historical survey of practices and ideas in the PSM field to develop a theoretical argument on capabilities to manage resource interfaces between buying firms and their suppliers. Findings – The paper proposes a framework linking learning, interactive capacity and interactive capability as they evolve through the interplay between resource interface type, organizing principle and technology strategy. Research limitations/implications – This paper contributes a conceptual framework focussing on the capabilities that underpin the management of individual resource interfaces. Practical implications – The paper offers the following practical implications: first, the firm needs to consider what type of interface applies in the relationships with its suppliers: second, the firm needs to consider its technological strategy in light of its current supplier interfaces and organizing principles: third, the internal as well as external organizing needs to be aligned with what the firm proposes to achieve from its supplier relationships and be congruent with the interfaces deployed to manage those relationships: fourth, interacting with suppliers is a matter of learning regarding the outcomes of the interaction as well developing interactive capacities and capabilities. Originality/value – The paper provides a first attempt to go beyond the characterization of individual resource interfaces in buyer-supplier relationships, to look at the capabilities required to manage multiple resource interfaces and the dynamics underpinning paths of development for those capabilities.

Type III secretion systems are used by many Gram-negative bacterial pathogens to inject proteins, known as effectors, into the cytosol of host cells. These virulence factors interfere with a diverse array of host signal transduction pathways and cellular processes. Many effectors have catalytic activities to promote post-translational modifications of host proteins. This review focuses on a family of effectors with glycosyltransferase activity that catalyze addition of N-acetyl-d-glucosamine to specific arginine residues in target proteins, leading to reduced NF-κB pathway activation and impaired host cell death. This family includes NleB from Citrobacter rodentium, NleB1 and NleB2 from enteropathogenic and enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli, and SseK1, SseK2, and SseK3 from Salmonella enterica. First, we place these effectors in the general framework of the glycosyltransferase superfamily and in the particular context of the role of glycosylation in bacterial pathogenesis. Then, we provide detailed information about currently known members of this family, their role in virulence, and their targets Spanish Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad , Agencia Estatal de Investigación, and the European Regional Development Fund, grant number SAF2016‐75365‐R European Union’s Horizon 2020 e Marie Skłodowska‐Curie grant agreement No 842629

Job regulations and the justice branch interfere on several aspects of labour contracts. We build a model which explores the role of labour courts on the wage distribution in both formal and informal sectors. We obtain that the presence of active labour courts produces a negative relation between the wage gap and the productivity of the worker, a regularity documented in the empirical literature. Active labour courts also reduce informality of unskilled workers but do not have an impact on informality of skilled workers. Some elements and implications of our model are tested using Brazilian data.

This commentary provides a short reflection on what marketing should be rethinking. We suggest that marketing should reconsider its relationship to markets, namely in the light of the so-called marketization wave (i.e., the use of market exchange as the principal mode of the coordination of socio-economic life based on the belief that markets are an inherently superior way of organizing the conception, production and exchange of goods). Our argument is that by dissolving economic into generic exchange, marketing unwittingly finds itself unable to pass comment on marketization whilst occluding its own contribution to the spread of marketization. The question that concerns us is whether marketing, as an academic discipline and as a set of professionalized practices, should engage with the marketization debate and if so, what form should this engagement take. We conclude and call for a more systematic assessment of how marketing practices have societal impact. We argue that marketing theory should pay closer attention to how it contributes to marketization by providing an ideology, a toolkit and expertise to expand the scope of markets. A more reflexive attitude as to how marketing contributes to marketization opens up a space of debate and critique on both the appropriate scope of markets as well as the role of marketing in making and operating markets.

This paper addresses the link between action and cognition in markets. Increasing reliance on markets to co-ordinate economic activity across diverse contexts underscores the need to better understand how such coordination is achieved and how it can be changed. Our starting point is sense-making in formal organizations and markets. We argue that, whereas focusing on intersubjective agreements supported by frequent communication provides useful insights on coordination in formal organizations, coordination in markets cannot rely on these mechanisms alone. We borrow Thevenot's (1984) notions of form and investments in form to show how cognition and action are interrelated, and coordination achieved, in market settings. A form is characterized by its capacity to generate temporal and spatial equivalencies, allowing us to move from the particular (e.g., one exchange episode) to the generic (e.g., recurrent exchanges with particular types of customers). The development of a form helps construct common contexts of action which become the basis for coordinated actions. Our empirical case describes how the introduction of Frequent Flyer Programs created a new market form following the US Airline Deregulation Act (1978). Under the previous regulatory regime, the US Civil Aeronautics Board controlled routes and prices and airlines were limited to competing on frequency and quality of service. We show how successive rounds of investments by a variety of market actors helped articulate and consolidate the new market form over a 10-year period. Whereas action preceded cognition in the early stages, the gradual consolidation of the new form provided opportunities for market participants to gain reflexive distance and conjure up further ways to engage with the form.

Monetary theory emphasizes that imperfect monitoring is necessary for money to be essential, that is, for money to achieve socially desirable allocations. Little is known about how limited monitoring must be if money is to be essential, though. Understanding sufficient conditions for the essentiality of money is important since monitoring is a natural way in which credit is introduced in monetary models. In this paper, we show that money can fail to be essential even if monitoring is quite limited. This indicates that one must be careful when introducing monitoring in monetary models to allow for the coexistence of money and credit.

This paper studies equilibrium selection in intertemporal coordination problems with delay options. The risk-dominant action of the underlying one-shot game is selected when frictions are arbitrarily small. Larger frictions introduce real option effects in the model and inhibit coordination.

We describe the preferred taxation regime in a small economy with uncertain institutional quality. We obtain that a preferential taxation regime in which taxes can be matched to the mobility of the tax base may be worse off than a non-preferential taxation regime in which taxes are constant across bases with distinct mobility. Since the small economy takes foreign taxes as given, our result is not driven by a downward pressure on revenues caused by unconstrained tax competition. It is instead related to the ability of a non-preferential taxation regime to credibly convey information about the institutional quality of the small economy. We present some empirical evidence which corroborates our results.

The efforts to address markets as socio-technical orders have hitherto focused on the role of marketing in shaping demand. However, in many markets the role of purchasing is just as important. This paper uses a case study to examine how a single buying company can attempt to shape an emerging market through its purchasing practices. As a result, the study identifies five types of market-shaping actions. Within each action type, the market-shaping behavior of a buyer in an emerging market can be very diverse and include internal actions as well as actions aimed at influencing other market actors. While agency on the purchasing side is often associated with large size organizations, namely government and public sector agencies, our case study shows that agencies on the purchasing sides can be deployed in a variety of ways rather than merely through raw bargaining power. The findings indicate that buying firms do not simply adjust their own purchasing processes according to existing offerings, but actively attempt to drive market evolution in particular directions.

Fundamental models of money, while explicit about the frictions that render money essential, are silent on how agents actually coordinate in its use. This paper studies this coordination problem, providing an endogenous map between the primitives of the environment and the beliefs on the acceptability of money. We show that an increase in the frequency of trade meetings, besides its direct impact on payoffs, facilitates coordination. In particular, for a large enough frequency of trade meetings, agents always coordinate in the use of money.

Purpose – The paper argues that indirect capabilities – the ability to access other organizations' capabilities – are an important and neglected part of firm strategy in procuring complex performance (PCP) settings, and that this is especially so if these settings are treated as genuinely complex, rather than merely complicated. Elements of indirect capabilities are identified. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This is a theoretical paper, drawing on complexity notions and Penrose's analysis of endogenous innovation to drive a disequilibrium-oriented discussion of the capabilities required by firms in a PCP setting. Findings – Six inter-related elements of indirect capabilities are proposed and discussed: IT infrastructure, boundary management practices, contracting, interface artefacts, valuing others' capabilities and relating direct to indirect capabilities. These are important in PCP settings and in other operations and supply settings characterised by complexity. Originality/value – This paper reconsiders the way complexity has been treated in the PCP literature and develops an extended discussion of the notion of indirect capabilities. It potentially provides the basis for an operations and supply strategy more attuned to the demands of shifting inter-organizational networks.

This paper proposes a typology for provider roles in defining business services. The starting point of the study is the underlying rationale of much of the service purchasing literature that buyers have or can easily access the necessary know-how to procure business services. If this does not hold, the implication is that buying firms would shy away from buying complex services. An alternative perspective recognizes that purchasing business services requires its own set of sourcing capabilities, which may be lacking. Buying firms may have limited know-how in terms of defining and articulating their requirements or not be fully aware of them in the first place. However, the buyer's lack of sourcing capabilities need not be an injunction to internalize the service. In these circumstances, service providers step in, help buying firms specify their requirements and play a key role in defining what is procured and how. We build on this interactive view of service definition to undertake a comparative case analysis of four business service contracting situations arrayed along two dimensions buyer perceived uncertainty and provider's buyer-specific experience. We conclude that service providers play different roles in each case. These are classified as translating, re-engineering, developing, and fine-tuning roles. (c) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (Less)

This comment addresses the context within which markets have turned into purported panaceas to alleviate poverty and promote development. Expanding formal markets and rescuing the poor from the traps of informality is often seen as recipe to unlock the untapped energies at the base of the pyramid (BoP), turning individuals into budding entrepreneurs and aspiring consumers. But, so far we have failed to appreciate how the informal sector plays a key role in supporting the formal economy and providing a route for subsistence at the BoP.

Lagos and Wright (2005) introduced an influential model of monetary exchange in which trade alternates between centralized and decentralized markets and money is essential. A limitation of their model and of the literature that follows is that they do not provide a microfoundation for the process of exchange in the centralized market. In this paper, we show that how one models exchange in the centralized market matters for the essentiality of money by describing the centralized market as a strategic market game and studying conditions under which money is essential.

This paper addresses the nature of temporality in business networks. Approaches to temporality generally employ a dualistic approach: time can be understood as social and natural, tensed and untensed, subjective and objective, kairos or chronos, agency and structure. We examine these two approaches and suggest that the problem for situated actors is how to cope with and negotiate with these dualities. This is particularly salient in cases of innovation, when actors attempt to bring about their particular versions of the future facing acute problems of uncertainty. The innovation literature highlights the role of narrative in helping actors to negotiate uncertainty and construct spaces for action in a world of continuous flow. The emphasis on narrative tends to obscure the role of management technologies in anchoring narratives into existing routines and procedures as well as relate these technologies to the untensed world of chronos. Management technologies help stabilise entities and relationship amongst entities in what otherwise is a chaotic world of events and flux.

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of exercise in multiple organs of rats treated with doxorubicin. Male adult Wistar rats were distributed into the following groups: sedentary + NaCl; exercise + NaCl; sedentary + doxorubicin; and exercise + doxorubicin. Animals were sacrificed 2 days following injections. Central fragments from heart, liver, and kidney were collected and minced in 0.9% NaCl being cellular suspensions used for the single-cell gel (comet) assay. The results showed that exercise was able to prevent genotoxicity induced by doxorubicin in heart cells. By contrast, exercise was not able to prevent genotoxicity induced by doxorubicin in liver cells. The same occurred to kidney cells, i.e. no statistically significant differences (p > 0.05) were found when compared with groups not exposed to doxorubicin. Taken together, our results support the idea that exercise could contribute to the protective effect against genotoxicity induced by doxorubicin in heart cells.

Mutual aid often entails the sharing of knowledge. We investigate how, in turn, knowledge sharing affects the long-run dynamics of mutual aid. In our economy, agents with specific knowledge are “held up” by their principals. Inside communities, agents aid each other by sharing their specific knowledge. This process generates a new type of knowledge which exacerbates the specificity of the existing types and induces more agents to engage in mutual aid. However, since the knowledge generated is shared, it progressively renders agents inside communities more flexible and, thus, less dependent on mutual aid. We characterize conditions under which in the long-run mutual aid spreads or is abandoned.

We compare allocations sustained by credit with allocations sustained by bank notes (inside money) in a search model with decentralized trade and limited monitoring. We demonstrate that there exists a credit arrangement that is superior to inside money. However, in contrast with inside money, this arrangement is not robust to an expansion of trade that is not accompanied by an adequate increase in the degree of monitoring. Therefore, banks are essential when trade is intense and monitoring is limited. As a historical application, we argue that our model helps explain the origins of banking in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

International audience; This paper addresses the issue of classification devices and their role in shaping markets. We depart from the notion that markets are shaped by multiple calculative agencies and examine how particular forms of calculation are made viable. Classification devices are the infrastructure that makes calculation possible and sustains particular economic orders. We illustrate these notions with an empirical, longitudinal study of a fuel retail company and its initiative to re-classify its network of petrol stations across Europe. Our study focuses on the extensive and protracted negotiations over what constituted relevant categories and the multiple perspectives involved in defining petrol station types. We illustrate how a store typology plays an important role in making assemblages of ideas (e.g. consumer-on-the-go), objects (e.g. store planograms), and managerial roles (e.g. category managers) coalesce around particular constellations of practices which impact upon the outline of markets.

It is generally agreed that within long-term relationships agents learn the characteristics of their market partners better than through spot transactions. In contrast, little is known on how relationship-based and transaction-based markets compare when agents learn about the aggregate economy from market exchanges. In this paper, we study the market structure that arises in an economy where agents learn the aggregate productivity from market exchanges. The model allows to relate the market structure to macroeconomic fundamentals such as the persistence and volatility of the aggregate productivity and the cross-sectional volatility of productivity.

Macrolides are characterised by their basic structure which is made up of a lactonic cycle with 2 osidic chains. They are classified according to the number of carbon atoms in the cycle : 14 membered macrolides (erythromicin, roxithromycin, dirithromycin, clarithromycin), 15 membered (azithromycin) and 16 membered (spiramycin, josamycin, midecamycin) macrolides. Epidemiological studies show that macrolides are amongst the safest antibiotics, but in these series, no drug allergy work up was performed. An immediate IgE dependent hypersensitivity has been shown with erythromycin in some cases. The mechanism is unknown and the skin tests are negative in most other cases. It would appear that the macrolide allergies are unlikely to be class allergies. Eviction is the treatment of choice. Desensitization has been successful in a few cases.

We consider whether reputation concerns can discipline the behavior of a long-lived self-interested agent who has a monopoly over the provision of fiat money. We obtain that when this agent can commit to a choice of money supply, there is a monetary equilibrium where it never overissues. We show, however, that monetary equilibria with no overissue do not exist when there is no commitment. This happens because the incentives this agent has to maintain a reputation for providing valuable currency disappear once its reputation is high enough. More generally, we prove that in the absence of commitment overissue happens infinitely often in any monetary equilibrium. We conclude by showing that imperfect memory can restore the positive result obtained with commitment.

"Fashion changes, but, should a fashion last for even a moderate length of time, so strong is the principle of inheritance, that some effect will probably be impressed on the breed." Darwin, C. (1883) "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication," p. 231. I. INTRODUCTION Fashion is thought as the tendency of consumers to prefer a variety, design, or brand of a good though it cannot be ranked higher than others in any intrinsically useful dimension. In natural sciences, Darwin's observations suggest that fashion can have dramatic, long-lasting effects. When revisited in the context of the industrial society, these observations inspire two questions: how does fashion influence the evolution of a product and how does this evolution feed back on the role of fashion? Moreover, can the effects of fashion explain why some fashionable varieties survive while others lose popularity when fashion changes? In this article, we take a step toward answering these questions. We examine the dynamic interaction between fashion and industry structure and how this interaction affects the relevance of fashion in the market for a product in the different stages of its life. In our economy, firms have two observable characteristics: the quality of their production and the prestige of their variety (brand). Both quality and prestige can take a high or a low value. Consistent with Darwin's observations, we assume that agents derive utility from quality but no direct or indirect benefit from prestigious varieties. We interpret fashion as a "norm" such that when consumers choose between two varieties with the same quality but different prestige, they opt for the most prestigious one. In other words, in our economy fashion is synonymous of brand loyalty, that is, the systematic tendency of consumers to be loyal to a variety or brand. We analyze how fashion affects firms' decisions in the merger market. By influencing firm mergers, fashion affects the evolution of the industry structure, meant in our context as the distribution of characteristics across firms. In turn, the evolution of the industry structure feeds back on the relevance of fashion. Intuitively, fashion lacks any intrinsic content and is only a norm for choosing among varieties or brands with the same quality. As such, its relevance changes as the set of consumption possibilities evolves with the industry structure. The way fashion affects firm mergers is the following. A fashionable low-quality firm and an unfashionable high-quality one have the incentive to merge with each other. Intuitively, a low-quality firm benefits from merging with a high-quality firm because it participates to the current profits deriving from high-quality production. In turn, a high-quality unfashionable firm knows that if it faces the competition of a high-quality fashionable firm it will not be chosen by consumers. If this probability is high enough, that is, if the share of high-quality fashionable firms is large enough, this firm will prefer merging and foregoing part of its current profits. By merging with a fashionable firm, in fact, it will potentially gain prestige and will overcome competition. Moreover, whenever such a merger occurs, with some probability the firm generated by the merger inherits both a high (low) prestige and a high (low) quality of production. Therefore, over time the merging process induced by fashion modifies the distribution of attributes (industry structure), which, in turn, feeds back on the relevance of fashion. We characterize the dynamics of (the relevance of) fashion in two cases. In a first more general case, we allow firms' prestige to decay at an exogenous rate. In this case, the dynamics of fashion is driven jointly by firm mergers and by the decay of prestige. The dynamics turns out to be potentially quite rich: though fashion loses relevance in the long run, for some values of the rate of decay, it can exhibit periods of rising importance followed by periods of declining importance. …

This paper examines a series of category review meeting between manufacturers of fast-moving consumer goods and retailers as instances of market-shaping. Our point of departure is that markets are performed and shaped by multiple calculative agencies whose encounters are organized in routine fashion. Our empirical case focuses on the presentations of manufacturers of non-alcoholic beverages to one retailer during the annual cycle of reviews and negotiations that punctuate the implementation of exchange routines between these actors. Each presentation draws on a range of arguments, data, metrics, as well as ways of defining and segmenting the category to propose strategies that either reinforce the status quo or overturn well-established conventions. Category reviews illustrate both the negotiated and distributed character of market practices as well as their paradoxical character, at once dependent on stable institutional arrangements whilst continuously undermining the foundations of that stability.

This article proposes a theory of financial intermediation based on intermediaries’ role in the reallocation of assets of distressed firms. The article suggests that intermediaries aggregate information on firms in credit relationships and use this information to facilitate asset reallocation across firms. However, this role of intermediaries hinges on debt contracts that grant lenders the right to foreclose assets of distressed borrowers and, hence, exclude the most productive asset users from the resale market. We characterise conditions under which intermediaries arise and under which their role in the credit market enhances their role as markets for firm assets.

Recent debates in economic sociology have moved away from a critique to homo economicus to a focus on how market exchange is formalized and abstracted from social relations. Rather than dwell on the disparities between the formalism and the practice of market exchange, the work of Michel Callon and associates focuses on the calculating agencies that enable the creation and operation of markets. This article provides a critical examination of these ideas and argues that they have important implications for marketing theory, namely in terms of a shift from exchange as events to markets as institutions. Rather than regarding marketing practices as operating within pre-defined markets, we argue that marketing practices have a performative role in helping to create the phenomena they purportedly describe.

This paper examines the current state of application of qualitative methods, namely case studies in purchasing and supply management. We argue that the case study method has much to contribute to the development of the discipline namely in terms of theory development, providing strong exemplars as well as testing theories culled from other disciplines. In examining the use of the case method in purchasing and supply management, we suggest that there is a noticeable trend away from single case designs with sparse methodological reflections to multiple case, comparative designs accompanied by the use of conventional method justifications. These developments are broadly welcomed but we identify two blind spots: (1) the relative neglect of the links between theory and method and (2) the use of inappropriate statistical criteria to justify multiple case research designs. We discuss the nature of these problems using a number of examples and formulate rules for conducting good case research.

We analyze the stability of monetary regimes in an economy where fiat money is endogenously created by the government, information about its value is imperfect, and learning is decentralized. We show that monetary stability depends crucially on the speed of information transmission in the economy. Our model generates a dynamic on the acceptability of fiat money that resembles historical accounts of the rise and eventual collapse of overissued paper money. It also provides an explanation of the fact that, despite its obvious advantages, the widespread use of fiat money is only a recent development.

This paper revisits the product–service distinction from an institutional perspective. Much of the literature in marketing and management has focused on the intrinsic characteristics of services with a view to derive implications for the management of service-based firms. Our key argument is that the quest for foundational differences between products and services is misguided. What counts as a product or a service is dependent on the nature of producer–user interactions and the institutional structure of production rather than on any essentialist feature of products or services. Furthermore, we develop the argument that services play an increasingly important role in manufacturing firms and we explore the reasons that underpin this trend.

We consider an economy where trade is decentralized and agents have incomplete information with respect to the value of money. Agents’ learning evolves from private experiences and we explore how the formation of prices interacts with learning. We show that multiple equilibria arise, and equilibria with price dispersion entail more learning than equilibria with one price. Price dispersion increases communication about private histories, which in turn increases the overall amount of information in the economy. We also compare ex ante welfare under price dispersion and one price. Our results show that, despite the existence of some meetings where no trade takes place, ex ante welfare under price dispersion may be higher than under one price.