The Imagined Market 
Donald MacKenzie
- Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science by Philip Mirowski
I’ve started giving my students money. Not to bribe my way to favourable teaching reviews, but to provoke reflection about the relations between economic and sociological views of human beings. The money is used to play the ‘ultimatum game’. A large class divides itself into pairs, who must not be friends or acquaintances. Each pair collects ten 5p coins. One of the pair proposes a division of the coins, and the other either accepts or rejects the proposal. The game is then over: no negotiation is allowed. If the offer is accepted, the students keep the coins, splitting them as agreed. If it is rejected, the coins are returned to me.
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Donald MacKenzie’s Material Markets: How Economic Agents Are Constructed will be published in January. He teaches in the School of Social and Political Studies at Edinburgh University.
Other articles by this contributor:
Fear in the Markets · Donald MacKenzie writes about the ways in which ‘finance theory’ becomes part of what it examines
The Political Economy of Carbon Trading · A Ratchet
End-of-the-World Trade · the credit crisis
What’s in a Number? · The $300 Trillion Question
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