The trans-disciplinary New Institutional framework identifies the importance of incentive structures in preventing opportunism in market making. In recent decades this theoretical tradition has increasingly shifted its attention from formal institutions to identify the significance of cultural processes in countering uncertainty, bounded rationality, and information asymmetries. More specifically the New Institutional perspective tends to focus on the formal mechanisms producing and reproducing culture, as opposed to an examination of specific cultural content. This attention to formal mechanisms means that value-rational action and commitments in market making receive insufficient attention. In order to examine the problems entailed in this trend, the case study of a financial market in which market making was constituted by the values of loyalty, duty, and honor of traders is used.
