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Personal versus Impersonal Trade: The Size of Trading Groups and Contract Law

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Abstract

The economic model of perfect competition depicts exchange as occurring between anonymous partners. Trade is anonymous because buyers and sellers are indifferent as to the identity of their trading partners. This characteristic of competitive exchange, sometimes called Jevons’ (1871) “Law of Indifference,” is implicit in the idea that commodities are homogeneous and traders care only about price.

Reprinted from International Review of Law and Economics (1984), 4, 15–22, with the kind permission of Elsevier.

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References

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Correspondence to Janet Tai Landa .

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Cooter, R., Landa, J.T. (2016). Personal versus Impersonal Trade: The Size of Trading Groups and Contract Law. In: Economic Success of Chinese Merchants in Southeast Asia. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54019-6_7

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