Ontology of Finance

Venue: Park 141, University at Buffalo (North Campus) & Zoom

Date: May 7, 2022

This will be a hybrid meeting. Those intending to participate should contact Gloria Sansò <gsanso@buffalo.edu> before May 5 specifying whether they will attend physically or via zoom.

Draft Program:

9:00 am Barry Smith: Introduction and Welcome

9:15 am Achille Varzi: Derivative Instruments

10:00 am Olivier Massin: Providing, Exchanging, Selling

Break

10:45 am Francesco Guala: Performativity Rationalized

11:15 am Emiliano Ippoliti: What is a financial crisis? Why a crisis? Some remarks on its ontological and epistemic preconditions

11:45 am Asya Passinsky: Cryptocurrency

Lunch

13:15 pm Samir Chopra: Artificial Agents

14:00 pm Nicolas Brisset: Emergence of Institutions or Performativity of Models

14:30 pm Gloria Sansò: The Role of Investor

Break

15:15 pm Christian Sprague: Towards a Market Ontology

Abstracts

Providing, Exchanging, Selling - Olivier Massin

On the standard view, an exchange consists in a transfer of goods motivated by inverse preferences. On the action theory I developed with E. Tieffenbach, an exchange consists in mutual provisions of goods or services motivated by convergent preferences and prompted by offers. I shall address two questions left open by the action theory. First, by providing a taxonomy of the various ways in which entities can be provided to persons. And second by proposing a definition of what selling and buying consist in.

Performativity Rationalized - Francesco Guala

Can the models of economics and finance be “performative"? Sociologists have been criticized for using the term “performativity” in a way that seems unfaithful to Austin’s notion. I will defend this usage, in particular against the claim that economic theories cannot constitute illocutionary acts. I will argue that a performative speech act in Austin’s sense is essentially a correlation device, and I will illustrate how such a device may work, focusing on MacKenzie’s study of the Black–Scholes model of option pricing. The goal is to show that Austin’s speech acts and the models of economic theory may perform similar functions in certain conditions. So economics may be performative in Austin’s sense.

What is a financial crisis? Why a crisis? Some remarks on its ontological and epistemic preconditions - Emiliano Ippoliti

What is a financial crisis? Why a crisis? The answers to these fundamental questions require that we characterize the ontological as well as the epistemic state of a financial market, by identifying the causes of a financial crisis, the basic entities involved, and the relations between them. In my talk, I will examine some of the main theories on financial systems — such as the efficient market hypothesis, the reflexive market hypothesis, econophysics, and so forth — in order to conceptualize financial crises. In more detail, I analyze how these theories: a) distinguish different causes (e.g. ‘endogenous’ vs ‘exogenous’ factors, ‘remote’ vs ‘proximate’); b) vary in the way that they conceive the basic entities and units of analysis (e.g. individuals vs aggregate); c) define what we can know about those causes and entities, and what they can reveal about an impending financial crisis. I use stock market crashes as an example to outline some of the ontological and epistemic preconditions for a financial crisis.

Towards a market ontology - Christian Sprague

In this paper we propose three terms that lay the foundation for a Market Ontology (MO) that is conformant with Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). Finance, marketing, and economics professionals use a wide swath of market related terms, but currently do not use them in reference to a domain ontology. MO is intended as a tool that situates these terms into a representational artifact which can be reused in contexts that address human social behavior related to economic activity. In this paper we present our definition for three terms: market, marketplace, and market region. To do so, we first compare several definitions for the term “market”, highlight the common features ascribed to the term, and propose our definition. Next, we propose definitions for the terms marketplace and market region. We conclude with a forward-looking discussion on the development of a MO.