2002 Reports

Substitutability Cross-Stream Between Oriented Markets: Conventions in the Wine Sector of France

White, Harrison C.

I explicitly model the social mechanism that constructs markets. Producers array along a market profile along which buyers trade off quality for volume. Outcome features can be predicted from two ratios of parameters, yielding a MAP. Five distinct families of market cultures correspond to its regions. As previous work showed, Supply equaling Demand is transmuted into matchings across local variabilities of valuation with volume and with quality. Such matching is vulnerable to unraveling, but it can be achieved with market oriented either upstream or downstream. This paper probes siphoning between markets lying cross-stream and thus generalizes substitutability within a market. Siphoning is shown to support markets whose members face increasing returns to scale, which violates orthodox microeconomics. Figure 8 illustrates key findings. Results illuminate the wine sector in France.