Financial markets derive their political and societal legitimacy from their ability to produce fair and accurate prices. However, reviewing the literature on how stock exchanges price securities, we find an inherent tension between market organization and price disclosure, which is borne out by this special issue's historical case studies.

For most of its history Amsterdam securities trading was entirely unregulated and spread over various venues frequented by different social groups, handicapping price transparency. A public price current emerged only in 1796 and then with wide bid-ask spreads to protect margins. To combat the confusion a curious pricing method, the mid-price system, emerged during the nineteenth century. Tied to a market microstructure centring on hoekmannen (market makers), this system transited effortlessly from a public market into a monopoly by 1913, self-governing, still without any government regulation, and offering wide rent-seeking opportunities.

Improved information technology and higher volume should drive orders to be concentrated in one market, lowering the costs of transactions. However, the opposite occurred during the bull market of the 1920s when rapid technological change spawned a flood of new issues. This article employs newly recovered data for 1900-33 on the volume and seat prices of regional exchanges to examine how these rivals successfully competed with the NYSE, leading to its relative decline at the zenith of the market. The history of US exchanges reveals that the tendency towards concentration of trading is periodically reversed when new industries, whose technologies are risky and unfamiliar, are more easily accommodated by existing or new rivals to the dominant exchange.