The Cognitive Infrastructures of Markets: Empirical Studies on the Role of Categories in Valuation and Competition, and a Formal Theory of Classification Systems Based on Lattices and Order

This dissertation addresses the question of how the information encoded by category labels is interpreted by agents in a market for the purpose of decision-making. To this end, we first examine the influence of categorization on economic and strategic outcomes with two empirical studies, and then use the insights provided by these studies to...