No Arabic abstract
Proving the existence of speculative financial bubbles even a posteriori has proven exceedingly difficult so anticipating a speculative bubble ex ante would at first seem an impossible task. Still as illustrated by the recent turmoil in financial markets initiated by the so called subprime crisis there is clearly an urgent need for new tools in our understanding and handling of financial speculative bubbles. In contrast to periods of fast growth, the nature of market dynamics profoundly changes during speculative bubbles where self contained strategies often leads to unconditional buying. A critical question is therefore whether such a signature can be quantified, and if so, used in the understanding of what are the sufficient and necessary conditions in the creation of a speculative bubble. Here we show a new technique, based on agent based simulations, gives a robust measure of detachment of trading choices created by feedback, and predicts the onset of speculative bubbles in experiments with human subjects. We use trading data obtained from experiments with humans as input to computer simulations of artificial agents that use adaptive strategies defined from game theory....
We present an overview of some representative Agent-Based Models in Economics. We discuss why and how agent-based models represent an important step in order to explain the dynamics and the statistical properties of financial markets beyond the Classical Theory of Economics. We perform a schematic analysis of several models with respect to some specific key categories such as agents strategies, price evolution, number of agents, etc. In the conclusive part of this review we address some open questions and future perspectives and highlight the conceptual importance of some usually neglected topics, such as non-stationarity and the self-organization of financial markets.
We present results on simulations of a stock market with heterogeneous, cumulative information setup. We find a non-monotonic behaviour of traders returns as a function of their information level. Particularly, the average informed agents underperform random traders; only the most informed agents are able to beat the market. We also study the effect of a strategy updating mechanism, when traders have the possibility of using other pieces of information than the fundamental value. These results corroborate the latter ones: it is only for the most informed player that it is rewarding to stay fundamentalist. The simulations reproduce some stylized facts of tick-by-tick stock-exchange data and globally show informational efficiency.
We revisit the epsilon-intelligence model of Toth et al.(2011), that was proposed as a minimal framework to understand the square-root dependence of the impact of meta-orders on volume in financial markets. The basic idea is that most of the daily liquidity is latent and furthermore vanishes linearly around the current price, as a consequence of the diffusion of the price itself. However, the numerical implementation of Toth et al. was criticised as being unrealistic, in particular because all the intelligence was conferred to market orders, while limit orders were passive and random. In this work, we study various alternative specifications of the model, for example allowing limit orders to react to the order flow, or changing the execution protocols. By and large, our study lends strong support to the idea that the square-root impact law is a very generic and robust property that requires very few ingredients to be valid. We also show that the transition from super-diffusion to sub-diffusion reported in Toth et al. is in fact a cross-over, but that the original model can be slightly altered in order to give rise to a genuine phase transition, which is of interest on its own. We finally propose a general theoretical framework to understand how a non-linear impact may appear even in the limit where the bias in the order flow is vanishingly small.
This short review presents a selected history of the mutual fertilization between physics and economics, from Isaac Newton and Adam Smith to the present. The fundamentally different perspectives embraced in theories developed in financial economics compared with physics are dissected with the examples of the volatility smile and of the excess volatility puzzle. The role of the Ising model of phase transitions to model social and financial systems is reviewed, with the concepts of random utilities and the logit model as the analog of the Boltzmann factor in statistic physics. Recent extensions in term of quantum decision theory are also covered. A wealth of models are discussed briefly that build on the Ising model and generalize it to account for the many stylized facts of financial markets. A summary of the relevance of the Ising model and its extensions is provided to account for financial bubbles and crashes. The review would be incomplete if it would not cover the dynamical field of agent based models (ABMs), also known as computational economic models, of which the Ising-type models are just special ABM implementations. We formulate the ``Emerging Market Intelligence hypothesis to reconcile the pervasive presence of ``noise traders with the near efficiency of financial markets. Finally, we note that evolutionary biology, more than physics, is now playing a growing role to inspire models of financial markets.
We consider models of financial markets in which all parties involved find incentives to participate. Strategies are evaluated directly by their virtual wealths. By tuning the price sensitivity and market impact, a phase diagram with several attractor behaviors resembling those of real markets emerge, reflecting the roles played by the arbitrageurs and trendsetters, and including a phase with irregular price trends and positive sums. The positive-sumness of the players wealths provides participation incentives for them. Evolution and the bid-ask spread provide mechanisms for the gain in wealth of both the players and market-makers. New players survive in the market if the evolutionary rate is sufficiently slow. We test the applicability of the model on real Hang Seng Index data over 20 years. Comparisons with other models show that our model has a superior average performance when applied to real financial data.