ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how imitation, contagion, and suggestion (ICS) vocabulary and theorization have been deployed to make sense of financial markets. While such markets might seem to constitute fields of interaction that have little to do with the clinical settings from which much of the late nineteenth-century interest in ICS originated, they nonetheless served as an important reference point for its adherents, such as trade. In 2013, the American economist Robert J. Shiller was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in recognition of his analysis of the ways in which social and psychological factors impinge on financial markets. The chapter argues that present-day financial economics displays an interest in mimesis that goes far beyond the work of Shiller. Fast-forwarding from early twentieth-century developments, the third section zeroes in on a strand of literature that emerged in financial economics around 1990, which suggests – in a manner similar to Shiller, but differently anchored – that mimetic forces are endemic to financial markets.
