ABSTRACT
The word market can refer to physical or functional situations of buyers and sellers. Physically, markets are the places where buyers and sellers meet, whether that be the corner grocery or the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. These days, however, the word less often denotes a place. The telephone order from a catalogue at midnight, to say nothing of the internet securities trade, do not occur in any single place, or even in any readily identifiable group of places.1 Where we used to experience a physical place, for example a store or an office, we now often experience only a communication, a phone call or an e-mail. Even the communications we experience may be very partial. Through the use of agents (consider retail insurance and equity markets), we may not even be aware of most of the transactions conducted on our behalf. Markets are dematerializing; the physical character of economic transactions is on the wane.
