Aayla Birrani*
An active and interactive interpretation of market and economic thinking through the concept of cognitive institutions. We contest conventional wisdom that views markets as either processors of dispersed information or as market structures. The alternate idea is based on the idea that the market functions as a "scaffolding institution." We go beyond the idea of scaffolding by introducing the idea of the market as a "socially extended" cognitive institution. This enactive perspective of economic reasoning views the market participant in terms of social interaction processes and relational autonomy. Markets can be thought of as "highly scaffolded," where powerful constraints and incentives reliably guide actors' behaviour. They are more than just passive information processing devices. Based on this concept, we propose that markets develop through ongoing and reciprocal economic interactions between the supply and demand sides as well as more fundamental social connections. Consumer behaviour in the marketplace is complex, extending the consumer's cognitive processes to reliably reach an accurate judgement of the good in addition to helping to decide the market price. Furthermore, rather than being carried out in isolation from other consumers, this economic reasoning is socially placed. Purchasing a good or not, from a socially placed, interactive perspective, enacts the market. This changes the position of markets from being external institutions that just cause cognitive processes in participants to be causally extended to social institutions that constitute these cognitive processes.