 While the existence of property rights – and hence of a minimal state that enforces them – has been recognized as a precondition for markets even by most libertarian thinkers, other preconditions are often not made explicit in economic approaches to markets, and are more controversial. As has been emphasized in particular by the members of the German “Freiburg School” of “ordoliberalism”, for markets to remain competitive there need to be anti-trust laws that prevent cartels and monopolies (see e.g., Eucken 1939; on how this view was replaced by more thorough-going laissez-faire views in the US see Crouch 2011, ch. 3). Sociologists have long pointed out the crucial importance of trust for the existence of market exchanges, as contracts in markets often include implicit elements that cannot be spelled out in terms of property rights and hence not be legally enforced (see e.g., the classic account by Durkheim 1997 [1893] or more recently Beckert 2002). Certain forms of social ethos, e.g., a commitment to keep promises, can facilitate market transactions (Rose 2011). Research in economic sociology also puts emphasis on the dependence of markets on other social relations. For example, Granovetter shows how market relations are often embedded in personal relationships, such as the relationships between the experts for certain technologies in different companies (1985). Fligstein emphasizes how the rules set by states, including, for example, rules about governance structures and other regulatory institutions, influence the behavior of companies in markets and make markets “a social construction that reflect the unique political-cultural construction of their firms and nations” (1996, 670; on the “legal construction” of financial markets see Pistor 2013). Some sociologists, notably Callon, also argue that markets depend on the performative power of economic theories about what markets are: these help individuals to frame situations as market exchanges (e.g., 1998). For example, MacKenzie argues that market participants in certain financial markets use theoretical models to determine their own behavior (e.g., 2009). Such examples make particularly clear that the markets we know are not something independently “given”, but depend on other norms and institutions in society, and sometimes even on certain forms of information technology. Even the ability of markets to deal with decentralized knowledge (Hayek 1945) often works in conjunction with “epistemic infrastructures” for markets provided by other private or public institutions (Herzog 2020). 