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AbstractCicero's letters to his friend Atticus are an invaluable source for the study of the financial and economic activities pursued by Late Republican upper‐class Romans. Beyond the information concerning the diversity, scale, and impact of their businesses, these extraordinary documents give enlightening testimonies to the psychological factors that affected economic behaviour and the process of decision‐making. The case of Tullia's shrine, a complex operation that concerned the search for and purchase of a garden‐estate in one of the most exclusive areas of the Roman suburbs, became Cicero's most personal challenge and obsession. An accurate study of this affair through the orator's own voice allows us to explore the concept of ancient rationality, as well as the psychological and environmental mechanisms that led to economic strategies and performances. The study also tests the applicability of ideas and methodologies from the field of behavioural economics in the context of the first‐century BC real estate market, a fluctuating and speculative business sector highly informed by credit culture, social status, and unstable politics.

This is the introduction to the issue Advertising Antiquity. The contribution offers an overview of theoretical and methodological approaches to advertising as an encoded system of communication that can be studied from multiple angles and fields. The text looks at the social and cultural impact of advertising on modern societies, as well as at its different uses of the past and, specifically, of Classical Antiquity in connection to modern values, aspirations and identities. The introduction also includes a comparative insight into ancient forms of political and commercial advertising and provides a summary of the content of the issue and of themes and trends drawn in the individual contributions.

"As it is today, the property market was a key and dynamic economic sector in Ancient Rome. Its study demands a deep understanding of Roman society, of the normative frameworks and the notions of wealth, value, identity and status that shaped individual and collective mentalities. This book takes a multisided insight into real estate as the subject of short- and long-term economic investments, of speculative and businesses ventures, of power abuses and inequalities, of social aspirations, but also of essential housing needs. The volume discusses thoroughly relevant and new literary, legal, epigraphic, papyrological and archaeological evidence, and incorporates comparative historical perspectives and methodologies, including economic theory and current, critical sociological debates about the functioning of modern real estate markets and issues linked to its commodification and regulation. In pursuing this line of enquiry, the contributions that make up the book investigate the impact of ideas such as profit, risk, security and trust in transfers, management and use of residential houses, commercial buildings and productive estates in urban and rural contexts. The work further evaluates the legal responses to and the public enforcement strategies concerning such activities, the high mobility of fortunes and unstable property-rights that resulted from one-off but also structural political, financial, economic and institutional crises that marked the history of the Roman Republic and Principate. This book aims to demonstrate the relevance of the study of pre-modern real estate markets today, and will be of significant interest to readers of economic history as well as Roman law, Roman archaeology, the history of urbanism and social history"--

This volume studies information as an economic resource in the Roman World. Information asymmetry is a distinguishing phenomenon of any human relationship. From an economic perspective, private or hidden information, opposed to publicly observable information, generates advantages and inequalities; at the same time, it is a source of profit, legal and illegal, and of transaction costs. The contributions that make up the present book aim to deepen our understanding of the economy of Ancient Rome by identifying and analysing formal and informal systems of knowledge and institutions that contributed to control, manage, restrict and enhance information. The chapters scrutinize the impact of information asymmetries on specific economic sectors, such as the labour market and the market of real estate, as well as the world of professional associations and trading networks. It further discusses structures and institutions that facilitated and regulated economic information in the public and the private spheres, such as market places, auctions, financial mechanisms and instruments, state treasures and archives. Managing Asymmetric Information in the Roman Economy invites the reader to evaluate economic activities within a larger collective mental, social, and political framework, and aims ultimately to test the applicability of tools and ideas from theoretical frameworks such as the Economics of Information to ancient and comparative historical research.

1. Asymmetric Information and the Roman Economy: Introduction -- 2. Economics and Information: Asymmetries, Uncertainties and Risks -- Part 1: Information Management -- 3. Managing Economic Public Information in Rome: the Aerarium as Central Archive of the Roman Republic -- 4. Managing Uncertainty and Asymmetric Information in Roman Auctions -- Part 2: The Real Estate and Land Property Market -- 5. Asymmetric Information, ager publicus and the Roman Land Market in the Second Century BC -- 6. Domum pestilentem vendo: Real Estate Market and Information Asymmetry in the Roman World -- 7. Marriage and Asymmetric Information on the Real Estate Market in Roman Egypt -- Part 3: The Labour Market -- 8. Information Asymmetry and the Roman Labour Market -- 9. Asymmetric information and adverse selection in the Roman slave market: the limits of legal remedy -- Part 4: Trade and Financial Markets -- 10. Information Landscapes and Economic Practice in the Roman World -- 11. Roman Professional collegia and Economic Control. A Monopoly of Information? -- 12. A case of Arbitrage in a Worldwide Trade: Roman Coins in India -- 13. Information Governance in Roman Finance -- 14.Conclusions.