2009. Vol. 10. No. 5

The study deals with e-markets for self-employed professionals (freelancers). These highly competitive markets emerge in a still weakly regulated cyberspace with virtual interactions. However, market ties between freelancers and their clients are not established as arm’s-length but largely as embedded ties. Social capital of freelancers becomes an effective instrument for fi nding the clients, raising earned income and reducing the moral hazards of opportunism. Empirical data are collected from an online standardized survey of more than 8 thousand freelancers, conducted by the authors in December 2008 at Free-lance.ru.

The paper suggests an original approach to production markets considered as social constructions. A stylized model of pure competition is criticized. Within each market each producing organization learns how to seek a distinctive niche for its output commitments and product quality among a nest of peers. Active guidance comes from watching actions of these other peers as signals of that market. They reproduce themselves as molecules built from these fi rms as atoms arranged in a linear way as an array of market niches. The paper describes general setting and a signaling mechanism around which the market molecule builds up. It also presents major results for an equilibrium model and its path dependencies. Finally, the paper explores possible switches in orientation along stream of goods and its evolutions over time.

The paper is devoted to history and present status of land relations in rural areas of Russia. It also studies collisions of divergent interests of agricultural producers originated from the uncertainty of property rights to land and competitive struggles for the best resources. As far as full-scale market relationships for land does not exist and “virtual” joint shared ownership prevails in Russia it is reasonable to speak about the formation of local markets for land rental where the competition turns out to be among large agricultural producers and farmers and where informal agreements preventing land turnover and protecting interests of tenantry are concluded. Thus, the informal system of agreements and compromises helps to compensate for the weaknesses of formal mechanisms for land tenure. Nevertheless, the barriers to transformation of land into capital assets dramatically hinder diffusion of innovations in agriculture development.

The paper is devoted to formation of social relations among firms. To explain how business relations emerge of the author examines selection criteria used by retailers and their suppliers for finding exchange partners in the contemporary Russian consumer markets. Based on the structural (network) perspective in economic sociology the paper demonstrates that business partner selection mechanism is a complex procedure which cannot be reduced to evaluation of profitability of transactions but has to take into account identity of exchange partners. Empirical data were collected from a standardized survey of 500 managers of retailers and their suppliers in five cities of Russia.

The paper presents a review of methodological approaches and empirical research on intergenerational transfers. Economic, sociological and demographic perspectives are considered. The focus is made on the overseas literature supplemented with some results of relevant research on Russia.