Description
Index providers have multiple audiences that have contradictory views of them and their indices. Despite their many differences, active managers, passive managers and those who use indices for market data believe indices represent ‘the market’. But the success of index providers has meant that, through those who track their indices, index providers change markets they are seen as impartially measuring. This undermines the unifier to their legitimacy for their multiple audiences. The work of Timothy Sinclair is deployed to examine how audience perception impacts how index providers exercise authority over their infrastructure. Firstly, in a conceptual manner, to develop understanding of the relationship between private epistemic authority and infrastructures. Secondly, using Sinclair’s notions of constitutive rules, to explain what unifies the multiple audiences of bond index providers. Lastly, how these constitutive rules affects the shape of bond market infrastructure produced by bond index providers. It is argued that the legitimacy of bond index providers stems from producing bond market infrastructure that their multiple audiences agree is ‘the market’. Therefore, whilst index providers do exercise power over how their audience interacts with bond markets, their audience also influences what is considered bond index market infrastructure and the politics embedded within it.
