Traders made costly unremunerated commitments to build the exchange, resembling collective action.

Evidence

The time-consuming, expensive lobbying, planning, and preparatory work that established the CBOE had many of the characteristics of collective action. The CBT was not a hierarchical corporation but a membership organization that elected its officials and voted on key decisions. CBT employees were paid for their work, but expenses were ultimately borne by the members of the CBT as a whole, and some members—Edmund O’Connor (the key original proponent of options), Irwin Eisen (chair of the Floor Procedures Subcommittee), and others such as David Goldberg, Patrick Hennessy, and Paul McGuire—took on substantial unremunerated commitments, which continued after the CBOE opened. O’Connor, Eisen, and Goldberg, for example, would sometimes lend newcomers the money (initially $10,000 but soon more) to buy a membership, with no certainty that the newcomer would succeed and be able to pay them back. On the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, similarly, Leo Melamed devoted large amounts of time he could otherwise have spent on profitable trading to leading its move into financial derivatives. — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 69

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Olson’s logic-of-collective-action problem: why do individuals pay private costs for a public good? MacKenzie’s institutional entrepreneurship parallels this. — connects to: Building financial derivatives exchanges demanded large unpaid, personally costly commitments from organizers — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 671; Options-exchange founders worked unpaid out of felt obligation to the exchange community — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 677; Creating the CBOE required costly unpaid collective effort by exchange members — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 69
• DEFINE: Illustrates the analytical move of casting exchange-building as collective action, a framework the reader could use in performativity work.

Related

• Creating the CBOE required costly unpaid collective effort by exchange members (similarity 0.94)
• Building financial derivatives exchanges demanded large unpaid, personally costly commitments from organizers (similarity 0.87)
• Options-exchange founders worked unpaid out of felt obligation to the exchange community (similarity 0.87)
• Rational-egoist theory cannot explain why anyone founded the CBOE (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Building financial derivatives exchanges demanded large unpaid, personally costly commitments from organizers #corroborates (0.95) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 671
• Options-exchange founders worked unpaid out of felt obligation to the exchange community #expands (0.85) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 677