Market and Other Allocation Mechanisms in Merchant Cities in Pre-Modern Europe

Lecture by Dr. Lars Boerner, London School of Economics.

Abstract

This presentation will look into the evolution of markets and specific clearing mechanisms to allocate goods, securities, and clear debts in pre-modern merchant cities.

The talk will emphasize the important role of consciously organized and designed markets and allocation mechanisms. The presentation will discuss reasons why such centralized markets came into existence, and how it affected the welfare generation and surplus division of market participants.

We will shed light on these issues by looking into specific case studies of spot markets, intermediation and matching with the help of brokers, auctions, and finally specific debt clearing algorithms for non tradable assets.

The goal is to give an overview of some results, to sensitize the audience for this underresearched field, and to discuss potential paths for future research to better understand market institutions.