Resolving Persistent Uncertainty by Self-Organized Consensus to Mitigate Market Bubbles

We propose a new paradigm to study coordination in complex social systems, such as financial markets, that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. This new context has features from prediction markets that have been shown previously to mitigate price bubbles in classical asset market experiments. Our setup is more realistic as it offers multiple securities that are continuously traded over days and, importantly, there is no "true" underlying price. Nonetheless, the market is designed such that its rationality can be evaluated. Quick consensus emerges early yielding pronounced market bubbles. The overpricing diminishes over time, indicating learning, but does not disappear completely. Traders' price estimates become progressively more independent via a collective realization of communal ignorance, pushing the market much closer to rationality, with forecasts that are close to the realized outcomes.