Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-fv566 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-24T10:23:23.040Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

12 - Reciprocal corrections of market failures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Serge-Christophe Kolm
Affiliation:
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Get access

Summary

Reciprocal solutions for correcting market failures

The situations of general sociability, respect, peace, and honesty could not be obtained by contracts of mutual agreement and exchange alone because of impossibilities and costs of constraining people and concerning information in a broad sense (plus the very basic fact that sentiments are important per se and cannot be bought). In the case of honesty limiting deceit and fraud, this impossibility of a correct contract is due to asymmetrical information. For general respect of people and property, this agreement would be an overall contract involving everyone (akin to the kind envisioned by Thomas Hobbes). However, such a sufficient actual contract is not possible because of costs and impossibilities in information, communication, contact, discussion, transaction, and writing the contract in sufficient detail. Such limitations to exchanges or agreements have many other occurrences. They include what is called “market failures” and extend more generally to agreement failures. Their causes are impossibilities or costs in the domains of information, imagining possible events, writing sufficiently detailed contracts, and, for implementing the contract, checking, monitoring, constraining as required, and in particular specifically excluding a person from a benefit that comes along with other advantages or that occurs jointly for several people. These “failures” are faced in a number of ways.

Type
Chapter
Information
Reciprocity
An Economics of Social Relations
, pp. 168 - 184
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×