The Boulogne fish market: the social structure and the role of loyalty

Abstract

We examine the Boulogne wholesale fish market, analysing the structure of the trading network between sellers and buyers. Differently from other works in the literature, our analysis indicates a significant amount of ‘bilateral loyalty’ seller–buyer. Loyalty is from buyers to a few sellers as well as from sellers to a few buyers. We also show that loyalty has an impact on prices, discriminating among agents.

Keywords:

• networks
• fish market
• loyalty
• price dispersion

JEL Classification:

• D40
• C49

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Annick Vignes for kindly providing the data.

Notes

¹ Seven buyers only play on the auction market.

² 4% of days have less than 100 transactions and 11% more than 1000.

³ The degree is given by the number of incoming and outgoing transactions. For each couple of players only the first transaction is considered for computation.

⁴ The relationship is confirmed by cluster analysis too. The results are omitted for lack of space.