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.
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.