We argue that repugnance can, in some cases, be strategically used as a resource by some ‘entrepreneurs’ who can use it to advance their own goals. To understand the conditions in which repugnance can be strategically used, we first propose a conceptual framework to characterize repugnance-related transactions and emphasize how concerned individuals devise narratives to manage these situations, increase (or even decrease) artificially their acceptability, and ultimately justify their behaviour. This framework, which combines relational proximity and the strength of social consensus surrounding a transaction, allows for predicting the costs of developing appropriate narratives. Then, we analyse four rationales by which entrepreneurial individuals exploit and use strategically repugnant dimensions. Repugnance can be strategically leveraged as a barrier to entry, a tool for niche differentiation, a mechanism of political and market polarization, and a means of attracting attention, thereby shaping competition, regulation, and visibility across markets and platforms.

This symposium is based on a workshop organized (online) on 24–25 February 2021 and sponsored by World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR). In this introduction, we stress the institutional dimension of repugnance, and show how it is dealt with in the papers gathered in the symposium. Kimberly Krawiec analyses repugnance in connection with externalities, and shows that contrary to what the ‘corruption theorists’ say, creating repugnant markets does not undermine social values. Peter Cserne shows that, in order to ensure a fully efficient regulation of repugnant behaviours, a transversal view combining the economic and legal approach to repugnance is necessary. The last two papers focus on entrepreneurship. Erwin Dekker and Julien Gradoz analyse the management of repugnance: how two firms, producing goods considered repugnant, adopt strategic behaviour to offset the costs generated by repugnance. Darcy W. E. Allen, Chris Berg and Sinclair Davidson take the analysis one step further and examine how ‘evasive entrepreneurs’ use repugnance as profit opportunity. Their innovations challenge social norms and the boundaries of what is viewed as repugnant in the society at large.

In her ‘Markets, repugnance, and externalities’ (2022), Kimberly Krawiec notes that the so-called corruption theorists fail to provide evidence that the adoption of repugnant behaviours or commodification destroy social values. She adds that, the values repugnant behaviours are supposed to destroy may even be reinforced after a market has been created. The explanation she explores is that the creation of a market never goes without debates that allow the society to ponder the values it stands for. We suggest an alternative view on the lack of evidence Krawiec identifies. Our starting point is Krawiec's interpretation of repugnance in terms of externalities. We claim that an analysis of repugnance based on externalities requires a characterization of what an externality is, which is rarely done. We show that economists use two opposed definitions of externalities, an objective and a subjective one, and then show what it implies for an analysis of repugnance and justify why the corruption thesis is not always verified empirically.

Economic accounts of repugnance concern two broad questions: the rationalisation of sentiments of repugnance (do emotional and visceral reactions of repugnance track valid reasons for not engaging in or condemning certain (trans)actions?) and institutional design (how to institute, regulate, or restrict markets in response to reasonable objections). If repugnance expresses valid practical reasons for regulating or limiting markets, our institutions should acknowledge and express these. If attitudes of repugnance are not rationalisable in the sense of instrumental or moral values, we should disregard or eventually counteract or reduce them. Focusing on a special case of repugnance, when commodification, i.e., the sale of goods or services for money meets societal disapproval, this paper identifies three characteristic ways to combine conceptual, empirical, and normative arguments and map repugnance into a disciplinary ‘epistemic frame’ of economics: repugnance as taste; repugnance as proxy for market failures or moral reasons; repugnance as hypocrisy or contingent cultural fact. Correspondingly, economists advise to (1) work around; (2) make sense of; and (3) explain away people's sentiments of repugnance.

This article argues for the need for the empirical analysis of how firms manage repugnance and core-stigmatization. To develop our empirical perspective, we compare the work on repugnance with the existing empirical literature in management on core-stigma and argue that core-stigmatization results from the mobilized repugnance. The core-stigmatized firm faces higher transaction costs. We demonstrate, through a case-study of the strategies of MindGeek/Pornhub in the online pornography market, how transaction costs economics can explain the choice of strategies to deal with core-stigma. Under most conditions, the increased transaction costs lead to vertical and lateral integration of the firm. In a dynamic setting, rival firms might use stigmatization to prevent the entry of a new competitor. Our second case-study on the early decades of the mail-order company Sears, Roebuck, and Company illustrates that repugnance, including racial discrimination, was mobilized by competitors to block the entry of the firm into the market.

This Article considers one aspect of the ongoing debate about the moral limits of markets – namely, the purported harmful effects of market transactions on particular relations, goods, services, or society at large, due to an inappropriate valuation. In other words, the argument is that some markets are ‘repugnant’ because they degrade and corrupt a variety of nonmarket values and relations, not just to the willing parties to the exchange, but to larger segments of society. This objection contains both a (frequently unacknowledged) empirical component and a moral component. This Article critiques these empirical claims on two grounds. First, market skeptics fail to provide evidence of the negative effects they hypothesize, despite widespread variation over time and across legal regimes. Second, these objections fail to account for the well-documented human tendency to fashion repugnant exchanges in a manner that reinforces – rather than undermines – deeply held values and relationships.