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Cited by 290

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 4 of the 4 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The big, bad wolf and the rational market: portfolio insurance, the 1987 crash and the performativity of economics

MacKenzie, Donald·2004·Economy and Society

Abstract

This article distinguishes two meanings of the performativity of economics, a thesis advanced by Michel Callon: ‘generic’ performativity, according to which markets and other economic relations are not to be taken as given, but as performed by economic practices; and ‘Austinian’ performativity, in which economics brings into being the relationships it describes. The two versions of performativity are explored by means of an examination of the history of portfolio insurance (a financial-market technique based on the economics of option pricing), of the 1987 stock market crash, and of subsequent efforts to diagnose the causes of the crash and to redesign the market to avoid future catastrophe. The article emphasizes the extent to which the financial markets of high modernity are designed entities, and argues that the question of their design is always a political question, even if it is seldom recognized as such.

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Metadata

Authors
MacKenzie, D.
Venue
Economy and Society
Published
2004-08
Volume
33
Issue
3
Pages
303-334
ISSN
  • 0308-5147 (ISSN-L)
  • 1469-5766
OpenAlex
W2007623571
Cited by
290
References
4
FWCI
33.98
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The big, bad wolf and the rational market: portfolio insurance, the 1987 crash and the performativity of economics. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1080/0308514042000225680
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MacKenzie, D. (2004). The big, bad wolf and the rational market: portfolio insurance, the 1987 crash and the performativity of economics. Economy and Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/0308514042000225680

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.