Imperfect Market Monitoring and SOES Trading

Thierry Foucault, Ailsa RÖELL and Patrik SANDAS
Additional contact information
Ailsa RÖELL: Princeton University, Postal: Princeton, NJ 08544
Patrik SANDAS: The Wharton School, Postal: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104

No 671, Les Cahiers de Recherche from HEC Paris

Abstract: We develop a model of price formation in a dealership market where monitoring of the information flow requires costly effort. The result is imperfect monitoring, which creates profit opportunities for speculators, who do not act as dealers but simply monitor the information flow and quote updates in order to pick off stale quotes. Externalities associated with monitoring can help to sustain non-competitive spreads. We show that protecting dealers against the execution of stale quotes can result in larger spreads and be detrimental to price discovery due to externalities in monitoring. A reduction in the minimum quoted depth will reduce the spread and speculators' trading frequency. Our analysis is relevant for the SOES debate given that the behavior of speculators in our model is very similar to the alleged behavior of the real world SOES bandits.

Keywords: monitoring; bid-ask spread; automatic execution; SOES trading (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C53 E30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999-08-01
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Working Paper: Imperfect Market Monitoring and SOES Trading (1999)
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