Introduciton

I submitted a paper abstract to GRISTS 2024 and was accepted.

The paper is tentatively titled Performativity, Complexity, and Framing in the FCC Spectrum Incentive Auction. Here is the abstract:

Abstract: In this paper, I study the Federal Communication Commission’s 2016 Spectrum “Incentive Auction” which was developed in collaboration with academic “market design” economists to reallocate spectrum bandwidth from local cable television broadcasters to mobile broadband providers. I will analyze the role of economic experts in this process from the perspective of the “performativity” of economics (Mitchell 2007; Callon 1998; MacKenzie 2008), focusing especially on how experts helped achieve framing that was necessary for the auction to both proceed and be understood as a success (leading to a Nobel Prize for chief designer Paul Milgrom). I will especially focus on the construction and stabilization of the concept of “complexity” in rendering the auction, its particular form, and expert intervention more broadly, as necessary. I will explore how complexity was made, what are the stakes of its making, and why it was understood by policymakers and the public as relevant justification for this particular technocratic intervention.

The requirements for the presentation are:

Presenters are expected to give presentations of approximately 10-12 minutes. Ahead of the conference, we will ask for short (around 1,000 words) summary papers so that faculty panel chairs and other participants can prepare to engage with your work.

I wrote a first draft of this paper for an STS course a few years ago, but have a lot that I would like to improve about the work ahead of the presentation in a few weeks. Over the next few weeks, I am going to focus my daily morning creative practice on revising and updating this work.

In this post, I will document my progress. I find documentation is useful for externalization and for having a feeling of making progress on the work.

Reviewing References

October 30, 2024

While I have a rough draft already, I am starting by revisiting some of the key background references that I would like to engage in this work, so that I can re-immerse myself in the conversation.

There are three main buckets of references I want to engage:

  • STS references from the “performativity” of economics literature. The key references here are:
    • A few pieces from Callon:
      • Callon, M. (1998a). Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics. The sociological review, 46(1_suppl), 1-57.
      • Callon, M. (1998b). An essay on framing and overflowing: economic externalities revisited by sociology. The sociological review, 46(1_suppl), 244-269.
    • MacKenzie, D. (2008). Material markets: How economic agents are constructed. OUP Oxford.
    • Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics is a useful edited volume:
      • The introduction
      • Mitchell, T. (2007). The properties of markets.
    • A few pieces from this literature that specifically discuss spectrum auctions:
      • Mirowski, P., & Nik-Khah, E. (2007). Markets made flesh (pp. 190-224). Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
      • Mirowski, P., & Nik-Khah, E. (2017). The knowledge we have lost in information: the history of information in modern economics. Oxford University Press.
      • Nik-Khah, E., & Mirowski, P. (2019). On going the market one better: economic market design and the contradictions of building markets for public purposes. Economy and Society, 48(2), 268-294.
  • Focal references from economists on the incentive auction. Namely:
    • Milgrom, P. (2017). Discovering prices: auction design in markets with complex constraints. Columbia University Press.
    • There are some others here too.
  • STS references from the Jasanofian co-production literature.

I am going to work through each of these and include my notes here. Let’s start with Callon, M. (1998a) since in my understanding this is the STS origin of the idea of performativity.

Callon (1998a): The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics

October 30, 2024

I am going to start by reviewing this piece from Callon titled “The embeddedness of economic markets in economics”.

Callon starts by exploring this idea that economic theory is detached from the “reality” of the market on the ground – it is impoverished in its representations of economic actors. This is what Mitchell (2007) later calls the “sociological critique” of economics, which Callon here also references. Callon is interested in an alternative approach:

The point of view that I have adopted in this introduction, and which the book strives to defend … consists in maintaining that economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observering how it functions.

One question this raises that I have been wanting to think about more is the question of how the performativity framing relates to the Jasanofian co-production frame, which I outlined my understanding of here.

Based on the above statement from Callon, I think that we can understand the performativity of economics as a particular type of co-production. For example, there is much in common between the above Callon quote with this general Jasanofian statement about the co-productionist lens:

the ways in which we know and represent the world … are inseparable from the ways in which we choose to live in it

My working hypothesis that it makes sense to think about performativity as a particular kind of co-production. What is being co-produced with what in this case?

  1. Knowledge about economic agents and economic markets (and how they are constituted, what they are capable of, how they operate) is being co-produced with
  2. Prescriptions about how economic agents and economic markets should work and behave – about what is necessary to make them “work well” or “be effective” etc.

However, I think that my thesis about the peformativity folks is that they leave under-theorized an important part of the story which is related to the question of why economic ideas are taken up by economic actors and economies, or the policymakers that control them. They attend to some parts of this: the materialities, the networks that hold economists’ frames in place. I analyzed some of this in my first draft. But left under-theorized is the question of why / how these frames are (understood as) necessary for economic actors. I.e. I am arguing that we should also pay attention to this deeper act of co-production where (pre-economic) agents are constituted as needing the help of something like a “framing” in the first place. This is the part of the argument (in the case of the FCC auction) that connects to the rendering of “complexity”.

To decide that something is complex is to make a fact about the world (i.e. the situation outside of the agents), but also about the agents themselves, and their ability to understand the world, and consequently to make something normative about what they require from policymakers etc. to handle this complexity.

In the case of the spectrum auction (and market design more broadly), the rendering of complexity also implies a particular configuration of economic experts in relation to policymakers. Their expertise is no longer transferrable; transition from economist as advisor to economist as engineer etc.