Interesting seminar today at the SSE with Donald MacKenzie on “How Algorithms Interact: Goffman’s ‘Interaction Order’ in Automated Trading”. At the seminar he demonstrated how buy and sell orders entered into an order book on a capital market queue, like—but not exactly similar to—how humans queue while, for instance, waiting for the bus. This is interesting, because, there is a moral order to a queue. In most countries the first-in-first-out (first in line, first to enter the bus) principle rules, regardless of gender, race or economic status. The queueing rule in the matching algorithm on a capital market similarly impose a moral order. And like the social rules of queueing may differ between countries, so the queuing rules may differ between markets.
Tags: algorithms, full post, Goffman, markets, moral order, trading