Who inflates the bubble? Forecasters and traders in experimental asset markets

Marcus Giamattei, Jürgen Huber, Johann Graf Lambsdorff, Andreas Nicklisch and Stefan Palan ()

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2020, vol. 110, issue C

Abstract: We use a laboratory experiment to study how forecasting contributes to mispricing. In the Baseline, we assign both the task of forecasting and the task of trading to the same subject. In treatment SamePay, we separate these tasks and assign them to two different subjects, who share the profits from trade. In treatment Accuracy, we pay forecasters according to the accuracy of their forecasts. We find that the separation of tasks induces some mispricing. Even worse, paying for accuracy reduces attention towards the fundamental value and generates major and persistent mispricing as well as trend extrapolation. We infer that it can be risky to incentivize only forecasting accuracy and not give forecasters the right “skin in the game”. Our findings are informative for tracing the sources of mispricing as well as for enhancing financial stability.

Keywords: Market efficiency; Analysts; Traders; Division of labor; Mispricing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 G12 G14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165188919301113
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:dyncon:v:110:y:2020:i:c:s0165188919301113

DOI: 10.1016/j.jedc.2019.07.004

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control is currently edited by J. Bullard, C. Chiarella, H. Dawid, C. H. Hommes, P. Klein and C. Otrok

More articles in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().