Balancing the Ties that Intertwine: Relational Balance in Multiplex Market Exchanges

• In Event: Markets with Meaning: Emotion, Morality, and Justification in Economic Life

Abstract

Exchange relations tend toward balance: we seek to repay those who have helped us and avoid prolonged debt. Prior research, however, has largely examined balance in uniplex relations - those structured around a single type of exchange. Yet most markets are inherently multiplex, consisting of transactions that span multiple, normatively distinct exchanges. Whether and how actors achieve balance within multiplex exchange relations therefore remains theoretically unclear. We examine this question using data on 5,544 exchange dyads among 696 household organizations across 16 village economies in Thailand. Because these organizations are simultaneously households and economic actors (eg. apartments above revenue-generating shopfronts), they interact in multiplex fashion: they exchange not only goods, but also labor, gifts, and kindness. We find that households in these markets routinely consider personal obligations when settling economic debts; economic transactions, in turn, are often used to resolve personal imbalances. More fundamentally, our results are consistent with a two-stage model of exchange in multiplex markets: when two transactions within a multiplex relation are governed by the same norms of exchange (economic or social), those norms determine whether excess giving in one exchange is used to offset deficits in another. By contrast, when exchanges span exchange domains (eg. one economic, one social), the attributes of the resource being traded govern balancing behavior: imbalances tend to propagate across exchange domains when both involve particularistic resources but tend to offset each other when the resources involved are universalistic. Implications for exchange theory in the context of multiplex markets more broadly are discussed.

Authors

• Andrew Joseph Foley, New York University

• Ruizhe Huang, Cornell University