“The Bazaar Economy or How Bizarre Is the Bazaar Really?”, Frank S. Fanselow1990-06-01 (mechanism design, sociology)⁠:

[previously: Geertz1978; cf. Posner1980] Critiques of the view that the bazaar is a model of the competitive market often portray it as exotic and irrational.

This article shows that the folk category ‘bazaar’ glosses over the analytical distinction between two types of market: (1) those in commodities which are standardized in terms of quality and quantity and therefore substitutable; and (2) those in commodities that are physically heterogeneous and therefore non-substitutable.

The features typically associated with the bazaar by its ethnographers are only found in the latter type of market. Drawing on ethnographic material from a south Indian town, the article shows that the differences in the transactional properties of the two kinds of goods account for a series of contrasts in the relations among and between buyers and sellers, the operation of the price mechanism, the control of information, the organization and recruitment of labor, and the roles of money and credit.