UNCERTAINTY AND THE ORGANIZATION OF STREET VENDING BUSINESSES

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Abstract
This paper reports preliminary findings about how households organize street vending businesses in response to varying sources and degrees of uncertainty. The thesis is that households organize themselves in different ways in response to different types of uncertainty associated with 1) earning different types of income and 2) differences as well as changes in intra‐household relationships. The important findings are twofold: first, that household members earn income from both “formal” and “informal” sources BOTH sequentially and simultaneously. The second finding is that people coordinate the efforts of household members with respect to (un)certainty to keep income flowing from the income‐earning activities the members are practicing. I review some empirical work on the informal economy and follow this discussion with data from Chicago's Maxwell Street Market.

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