Excellent question. No, indeed, markets do not exist. And with that, I pulled the pacifier out of the mouths of economists, investors, marketers, and entrepreneurs. And many of them will start crying.
There is a crucial difference between markets and marketplaces, as in the difference between consequence and cause.
Marketplaces are animate objects, identified as gathering places of buyers and sellers since the beginning of time. To wit, many large cities in Europe still have what may be called a “marktplaats” or “grand place” in the middle of town where the local farmers would gather to sell their goods.
To assign conclusions from the type-casting of a market reveals you do not understand the difference between cause and consequence.
A market may at best be considered a temporal, or snapshot consequence of a marketplace as its cause. For buyers and sellers congregate because a marketplace exists, not because a market exists. The confounding of consequence and cause stemming from a confounding of market and marketplace is what Nietzsche referred to as grave depravity of reason. The depravity of reason so eagerly adopted by the study of economics, and the source of deeply rooted and misplaced speculation.
To answer your question directly, no, there is no evidence that markets exist. Because they are inanimate objects, proven consequential and obsolete manmade type-castings the minute they are defined. Except in the minds of those who believe in the voodoo of economics (see this: We Must Reinvent Economics).
I declare markets false in addition to non-existent using other arguments listed in a blog I originally wrote in 2008, here: Markets don’t exist
