This chapter explores how Market Studies scholars can usefully direct their expertise and attention to the complex challenges thrown up by the required shift to the imaginary circular economy. We propose a framework and research agenda for the infrastructuring moves required to fundamentally shift the sociomaterial, technical, political and economic arrangements that sit below our linear economy, in order to reconfigure how our economy works. The need for greater fungibility at a local, regional, national and international scales, and for new forms of governance are seen as critical to success. However, while Market Studies scholars are well-equipped to address these challenges, we need to do more than simply deploy existing conceptual frameworks and tools, asking, what demands do circular economy concerns place upon Market Studies? We argue that theories of materiality and valuation need to be extended if not reformulated, to accommodate many of the features associated with circularity. We recommend that scholars engage more actively with understanding the infrastructures of supply and demand that compose the linear economy, the practices that sustain that demand, and the practices of repair, remanufacturing, retrofitting, upgrading, and enabling new modalities of access to goods.

This chapter is concerned with understanding the history and operation of the market for political risk insurance, and the related political risk analysis industry that provides metrics, narratives and pricing prosthetics that are used by insurance brokers and underwriters when they negotiate terms and prices for the cover they provide. These prosthetics include a variety of colour-coded ‘heat’ maps, indices and geographical categorizations (such as ‘Sub-Saharan Africa’, ‘MENA’ [Middle East and North Africa] or ‘Asia-Pacific’), which do not determine the pricing of political risk insurance cover but, rather, act as ‘technologies of the imagination’ (Gilbert 2020a) and spur imaginative effects and particular approaches to valuation. As political risk insurance (PRI) brokers and underwriters would themselves argue, PRI does not lend itself to an actuarial mode that seeks to predict the likelihood of future ‘political risk events’ based on statistical tabulation of past occurrences.

This chapter contributes to understanding market design by examining the construction, mobilization, and contestation of facts and fetishes within an ongoing design process, introducing the notion of ‘factishing’ a market. The premise is that facts and fetishes are manufactured and interconnected, shaped by different market actors, and serve different purposes. This combination empowers multiple market actors to make market design work in practice and catalyses market innovation. This conceptualization draws on the empirical case of the Brazilian cancer pill, phosphoethanolamine. This substance was originally intended to ‘cure cancer’ and became the centre of a protracted conflict involving patients, researchers, a public university, physicians, courts, the regulatory agency, and legislators, intensely covered by national media outlets, culminating in the pill’s emergence in the market as a dietary supplement.

The concept of assetization has been recently developed to designate the social processes through which things are turned into assets. Building on the case of the market for social investment in France, this chapter proposes to untangle the two concepts of marketization and assetization. Assetization occurs when a market object is constructed in such a way that it provides a rent to its owner. However, this chapter departs from the view that describes assetization as the unintended outflow of marketization. Instead, it examines how the prospect of assetization can actually be the key driver behind the creation of new markets. It contends that such entanglements between marketization and assetization should be tracked by investigating: a) whether new markets are supported by coalitions dominated by financial investors and b) whether these markets feature capitalization agencements designed at channelling rent to such investors. It concludes by detailing the conditions needed to untangle the marketization process from the assetization one and calls for Market Studies to exert scrutiny over how numerous ‘markets for collective concerns’ end up being turned into ‘markets for investors.’

This chapter is intended as a conversation piece aimed at our fellow Market Studies scholars. The goal is to bring to the fore some of the possibilities and challenges of activities usually grouped under the term market design cause to our field. The argument unfolds in four steps. First, we draw on resources from economic history, economics, and Market Studies that, although in different ways, emphasize engineering in relation to economics and markets. We mobilize them to show how engineering rather than the looser notion of design provides a more precise and productive conceptual starting point for studying the work of market designers. Second, drawing on previous work by the authors, we provide two empirical illustrations of market engineering in action. Third, we combine the conceptual and empirical antecedents to delimit what we mean by the concept of market engineering. Fourth, we explore how market engineering is not only a relatively new problem of analysis for Market Studies scholars, but also challenges central conceptual and analytical habits that characterize research in this community.

The Coca-Cola bottle is among the most famous product packaging in the world. Consumers everywhere instantly recognize the distinctive curvy bottle and understand what it represents. It has been celebrated as a design classic and featured prominently by artists ranging from Norman Rockwell to Andy Warhol. The bottle is not only a cultural icon but also a triumph of branding, its goodwill built up over time by the Coca-Cola Company’s heavy investments in advertising and other forms of marketing.

The traditional legal framework for assessing liability for false and misleading advertising is whether the advertising is likely to deceive consumers acting reasonably under the circumstances. Typically, the plaintiff also has to show materiality – that the allegedly deceptive advertising would be important in a consumer’s decision to purchase the product or service.1

A general premise of consumer protection is that greater consumer information and more competition in a market should increase the tendency of firms to behave fairly and honestly.1 In the case of deceptive promotional pricing, greater consumer information comes from having more consumers in the market being attentive to and knowledgeable of reference promotional pricing (i.e. showing a regular price along with the sales price).

This volume emerged from the notion that marketers and lawyers often talk about the same things. They may use different names, but essentially the things they talk about are the same. For example, while marketers talk about brands, lawyers talk about trademarks. However, relatively late in the process of editing this volume, we, as editors, had a somewhat unsettling realization. Throughout the planning and editing process for this book, we had been laboring under, not unrelated, but certainly not identical, views about the domain of marketing and the reach of law. We had no real common understanding of what marketing is, what marketing theory entails, and how the law shapes and governs marketing activities. Such a state of affairs is part of the inevitable risk of bringing together a group of scholars from two distinct disciplines. Fortunately, the realization helped us recognize that both marketing and law are sometimes vessels into which users can pour whatever content they wish. At the start, therefore, we thought it wise to dispense with some misconceptions and offer at least some working definitions of the terms and ideas we encounter in this volume.

When should government mandate labels? When would mandatory labels have desirable consequences for social welfare? How can those consequences be measured? When would labels do more good than harm?

When does the law persuade us about what is right or wrong – and when does it not? On topics ranging from racial equality to abortion to same-sex marriage, historians have debated and puzzled over the law’s persuasive force on our collective moral intuitions. Meanwhile, other scholars have sought out individual-level insights into the psychology of law’s persuasion, under the microscope of controlled experiments.

Class action damages used to be boring. Essentially an accounting exercise, they came at the end of the case, after resolution of the more interesting issues of what the defendant did and whether it was liable for doing it. And because trial rarely happens, especially in consumer class actions where jury awards can be untethered to damages estimates and potentially astronomical, the damages reports quietly served by the dueling expert witnesses near the close of discovery served mainly as a benchmark for pretrial settlement discussions.

A brand element establishes secondary meaning when it becomes synonymous with the brand and serves as a source identifier for consumers. In legal parlance, secondary meaning has been defined as occurring when “in the minds of the public, the primary significance of a product feature or term is to identify the source of the product rather than the product itself.”1

According to the American Marketing Association, a brand is defined as “a name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s goods or service as distinct from those of other sellers.”1 But to the brand owners, customers, employees, and investors, a brand is much more than just a name. A strong brand is a prized asset for many corporations. It can energize and engage the employees, create alignment around common values, and promote emotional and intellectual engagement at work. Strong brands can create positive associations in the consumer’s mind and reduce purchasing risk and search costs in buying situations. Not surprisingly, strong brands often outsell the competition, realize higher repeat purchase rates, are able to charge premium prices, and can command customer loyalty over a long time.