Prateek Raj studies the different ways in which people organise to do business under varying cultural and institutional conditions. He is especially interested in organisations of the past like European merchant guilds, and of developing countries like Indian caste networks. He is a final year PhD Candidate in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at University College London and a Research Associate at the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Additionally, he is visiting Kellogg School of Management and Center for Economic History at Northwestern University since 2015. Prateek was born and brought up in Bihar and Jharkhand, states in eastern part of India. He graduated from IIT Delhi in 2010, and was an Associate Consultant at DasturCo to clients in metals and mining sector. He was also a Guest Teacher at Department of Management at London School of Economics from 2012 to 2015.
Markets don’t function well if they are ridden with frictions like lack of information or lack of trust. A new working paper finds that cities in the sixteenth century where monopolies of densely networked merchant guilds declined had significantly higher levels of printing, as they were early adopters of printing technology. Additionally, these cities were found on the Atlantic coast, where traders had the greatest incentives to form new connections with unfamiliar traders.
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Should the U.S. enforce more explicit restrictions on monopolies, or can innovation and democracy alone mitigate the pervasive effects of monopoly power? A panel of historians and economists at the recent Stigler Center conference on concentration in America discussed the historical evolution of this debate.
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Narratives that alter beliefs and change norms or guiding principles may indeed have real and lasting effects.
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Close-knit networks, like guilds and taxi associations, are helpful in enhancing trust and reliability. Yet they can also become exclusive and rent-seeking.
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Narratives are vectors of ideas. Nobel laureate Robert Shiller suggests that in the age of social information networks, economists need to rethink how and why information really spreads.
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