Somewhere in Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities by Lucien Karpik (translated by Nora Scott) is a fascinating book trying to get out. First, the good news. The book analyses a type of product/service steadily growing in importance in the advanced economies, a category to which standard economic analysis of markets does not apply. “These overlooked markets are markets of singular, incommensurable products.” Examples are works of art, fine wines, personalized professional services or other kinds of expertise, tourism, handcrafted luxury goods, and so on.

All are sufficiently distinctive that they go beyond the conventional category of product differentiation, which is of course addressed by standard economic models. Many of them are experience goods, which are known to present problems for conventional analysis. But they go beyond that – not only does the purchaser not know until consumes them what they are like, which is true of any book or TV programme or movie, but even after consuming or using a singular good, it will still be hard to evaluate their quality. For instance, suppose you hire an expensive consultant – how do you know even after the event how good his advice to your business has been? It depends on evaluation against an unknown counterfactual. Or to give another example, the utility derived from owning a painting will continue to depend on the evaluation of others as well as the continuing experience of the owner looking at it.

Karpik argues, interestingly and plausibly, that the valuation of goods and services in the category of singularities depends on judgment, a mode of thought which calls on rational self-interest but is distinct from the process of calculated decision which we apply in conventional economics. He notes that most models rely on assumptions about an entity called information: It is “immaterial and homogeneous; it creates objective knowledge about reality and, thereby, the universality of rational choices.” Models can cope with asymmetries of information, or gaps, but not with the non-applicability of information. It struck me that this is true, and 'information' plays a role in economic analysis much like the role of 'ether' for earlier generations of natural scientists. Introducing a decision domain in which judgment is applied strikes me as very interesting.

The book goes on to explain the kinds of construct which facilitate the making of judgements, devices which build trust in products or services. These include institutions (often appealed to as devices for overcoming information asymmetries) but also adverts, reviews and critics, and so on. Karpik lists the following categories: social networks; 'appellations' such as brands or trademarks or professional titles; 'cicerones' or guides such as critics or media pundits; rankings either by critics or by popularity such as bestseller lists; and 'confluences' which means techniques such as organising items on supermarket shelves or using mall architecture to influence consumer choice. He goes on to give examples of all of these decision devices.

So all this is very interesting. Now the bad news. Much of the book is written in almost impenetrable language, even for an academic text. I always hesitate as an economist to criticize the writing styles of people in other disciplines, but I do find the language of academic sociology almost always militates against understanding. What's more, the author is French and although it is no doubt an excellent translation, French academic language (j'accuse Roland Barthes) superimposes semiotics on sociologese. There are many sentences I literally could not understand, despite several goes.

So here's a challenge for blog readers. Can you suggest clearly written and accessible sociology books? My nomination is Heatwave by Eric Klinenberg, a brilliant and utterly readable analysis of how differing social contexts led to dramatically different death rates around the city of Chicago during the 1995 heatwave. More ideas please.