When Herding and Contrarianism Foster Market Efficiency: A Financial Trading Experiment

Andreas Park and Daniel Sgroi

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: While herding has long been suspected to play a role in financial market booms and busts, theoretical analyses have struggled to identify conclusive causes for the effect. Recent theoretical work shows that informational herding is possible in a market with efficient asset prices if information is bi-polar, and contrarianism is possible with single-polar information. We present an experimental test for the validity of this theory, contrasting with all existing experiments where rational herding was theoretically impossible and subsequently not observed. Overall we observe that subjects generally behave according to theoretical predictions, yet the fit is lower for types who have the theoretical potential to herd. While herding is often not observed when predicted by theory, herding (sometimes irrational) does occur. Irrational contrarianism in particular leads observed prices to substantially differ from the efficient benchmark. Alternative models of behavior, such as risk aversion, loss aversion or error correction, either perform quite poorly or add little to our understanding.

Keywords: Herding; Informational Efficiency; Experiments. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G14 G24 G28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2008-04-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.economics.utoronto.ca/public/workingPapers/tecipa-316.pdf Main Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: When Herding and Contrarianism Foster Market Efficiency: A Financial Trading Experiment (2008)
Working Paper: When Herding and Contrarianism Foster Market Efficiency: A Financial Trading Experiment (2008)
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:tor:tecipa:tecipa-316

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().