‘The market sets the price’: determining prices in a Bolivian marketplace
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the processes influencing the retail prices set by fresh produce vendors in an open‐air marketplace. I demonstrate that frameworks used by other anthropologists to understand the formation of retail prices cannot explain how vendors in Challapata, Bolivia, determine their selling prices. Using Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, I argue that in order to understand how vendors formulate their prices we have to look beyond the commodity being sold and explore the relations underlying their exchange. I suggest that the household maintenance of vendors and customers is linked through commodity transactions and that the resulting interdependence shapes the formation of retail prices in Challapata. Résumé L’article explore les processus influant sur les prix de détail pratiqués par les marchands de produits frais sur un marché de plein air. L’auteur démontre que les cadres utilisés par les autres anthropologues pour comprendre la formation des prix de détails n’expliquent pas comment les vendeurs de Challapata, en Bolivie, fixent leurs prix de vente. À l’aide du concept de fétichisme de la marchandise de Marx, il affirme que pour comprendre comment les vendeurs calculent leurs prix, il faut voir plus loin que la marchandise vendue et explorer les relations qui sous‐tendent son échange. L’auteur suggère que les maisonnées des vendeurs et de leurs clients sont reliées par les transactions de marchandises et que l’interdépendance qui en résulte dicte la formation des prix de détail à Challapata.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".