This paper investigates experimentally a market inspired by two separate strands of economic literature. The first strand is that of herd behaviour in non-market situations and the second that of the aggregation of private information in markets. The first suggests that socially undesirable herd behaviour may result when information is private; the second suggests that in a market context the private information may be aggregated efficiently through the price mechanism. The latter literature therefore suggests that socially undesirable behaviour may be eliminated through the market mechanism. We tested this hypothesis experimentally, in a very simple extension of a herd model into a market context, and found that many of the stylised facts of financial markets (i.e. fat tails of the distribution of returns and autoregressive dependence in volatility) can be reproduced in our experimental market.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Experimental with number
0401002.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)