metamarket

A group of businesses that offer products that are related from a consumer's perspective but which have no institutional connections.

While the activities that constitute a metamarket are logically related from the consumer's perspective, the products and services that they map into may be quite unrelated from the producer perspective.

Now, when a construction firm, dealer, housing finance firm, interior designer, furnishers, media, and internet site come together, a metamarket is created.

A market that trades in the medium of exchange of a lower-level market, such as money, derivatives, or credit.

Meanwhile as the metamarket booms, the few remaining souls who did not get in on the ground floor, have no choice but to pursue eschatology.

All these processes eventually cause reversals which reverberate across metamarkets and down to lower-level markets, in which the instruments of exchange in a metamarket (say, credit and money) become less available to facilitate exchange, thereby sending the lower market into instability or at least retraction.

A market that trades in access to audiences or consumers.

These audiences have a price: they constitute metamarkets. The market -- for toothpaste, mobile phones, and optional extras on cars -- passes through the metamarket of audiences.

They provide access to a metamarket of millions of minds whose attention can be captured and conditioned to adopt new consumption goods'.

The social and political infrastructure within which a market functions.

A market cannot operate at its full capacity unless it has a metamarket that reduces its costs, internalizes externalities, stabilizes contractual relations, and guarantees property rights.

Our interest in Coase's theorem, which we shall examine in the following section, lies precisely in that it delineates the conditions under which it is possible to separate the economic market from the institutional metamarket, thus allowing us to study those institutions which propitiate this segregation and leading us to specify mutual influences when this segregation is not possible.

The process of promoting the exchange or adoption of things other than goods or services that are offered for sale.

In this sense, a campaign to respect the rights of nonsmokers in public places through legislation is a "product" that is as real as a Winston "that tastes good like a cigarette should." This broader, more abstract definition also means the conventional theory of a "product life cycle" is pertinent to metamarket organizations.

All are contained in a kind of metamarket that peddles, basically, immortality. This metamarket is what we call consumerism.