Communication in financial markets with several informed traders

This paper investigates the incentives for informed traders in financial markets to reveal their information truthfully to the public. In the model, a subset of traders receive noisy signals about the value of a risky asset. The signals are composed of a directional component (“high” vs. “low”) as well as a precision component that represents the quality of the directional component. Between trading periods, the informed agents make public announcements to the uninformed traders. With a sufficiently large number of informed traders, an equilibrium exists in which the directional components are credibly revealed, but not the precision components. Even though the informed traders retain some of their rivate information, the post-communication estimate of the asset value converges in probability to the full-information estimate as the number of informed traders increases. The paper is based on a chapter of my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Western Ontario and was circulated previously under the title “Public Communication Devices in Financial Markets.” I thank my dissertation committee Arthur Robson, Hari Govindan, and Al Slivinski for their guidance and support. I also thank Murali Agastya, Roland Benabou, Philippe Grégoire, Rick Harbaugh, Mike Peters, an anonymous referee and an associate editor, and seminar participants at various universities and conferences at which this paper was presented.     

Exploring the role of pesticide traders in protecting farmers' benefit

Owing to the inadequacy of the public extension services, farmers in developing countries often rely on the suggestions of agricultural input traders. As profit-making agents, these traders, in their turn, may have an incentive to exploit farmers by suggesting relatively expensive inputs. In this study, the Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) estimation method is applied to demonstrate that input traders in many ways play the substitute role of the public extension agents in a developing country. In the process, this study relied on primary information collected from 379 farmers in Bangladesh in two seasons (N = 758). Then the ESR estimation procedure is applied to predict farmer's expenditure on pesticides, conditional on whether or not they rely on traders' advice. Findings of this study suggest that pesticide expenditures are not statistically different between the farmers that rely on traders' suggestions and those that do not. The study thus concludes that by providing unbiased, useful information to the client farmers, profit-maximizing agricultural input traders render the services of public extension workers, which corrects possible market failures.     

OLIGOPOLY AND COST SHARING IN ECONOMIES WITH PUBLIC GOODS

We study economies that involve both small and large traders as well as the choice of a public project. Within this framework, we establish two sufficient conditions under which the set of competitive allocations coincides with the core. Our first core equivalence result holds under the assumption that there is a countably infinite set of large traders similar to each other. The second result, independent of the number of large traders, requires the existence of a coalition of small traders with the same characteristics of the large traders. Finally, we show how the generalized Aubin approach to cooperation may dispense with both conditions.     

Incomplete Markets, Allocative Efficiency, and the Information Revealed by Prices

We compare rational expectations equilibria with different degrees of information revelation through prices. These equilibria arise in a two-period exchange economy with finitely many states and signals, multiple commodities and incomplete financial markets for nominal assets. We show that there are always equilibria where information is redundant in the sense of being of no value to the uninformed traders. We give conditions under which for a generic set of economies, parametrized by endowments and utilities, there exist open sets of equilibria for which allocative and informational efficiency are independent, with implications for monetary policy. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D52, D60, D82, E52.     

Dynamic information release

This note discusses the desirability of dynamic information releases. It is argued that such releases are socially valuable because theycreate insurance opportunities that do not exist without them. These new insurance opportunities occur because new public information causes prices to change which in turn allows traders to improve the spanning ability of existing securities by dynamic trading. This argument contrasts the static argument pioneered by Hirshleifer (1971) that public information oftendestroys insurance opportunities and is therefore not socially valuable.I thank Robert Litzenberger and Jiang Wang for helpful comments. Financial support from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is gratefully acknowledged. Remaining errors are my own.     

Insider trading with public and shared information

We study the impact of public information and shared information on traders' trading behavior in the context of Kyle's (1985) speculative market. We suppose that there are four types of traders in our model: one insider, M outsiders, liquidity traders, and market makers. We explicitly describe the unique linear Nash equilibrium and find that public information harms the insider but benefits the outsiders and noise traders. Also, the market is more efficient because of the existence of public information.     

Information and crowding externalities

Summary. We analyze a model in which agents have to make a binary choice under incomplete information about the state of the world, but also care about coordination with other agents who have the same problem. In some of these situations, the larger the share choosing the same alternative, the better off are agents. In others, if too many people choose the same alternative, agents could be worse off, due to crowding externalities. Agents receive public and private information about the state of the world. We determine whether agents rely more on private or public information, and whether or not their choice behavior is socially efficient. We characterize existence conditions for equilibria in which either all available information, or only the public information is used for decisions, compare the two equilibria in terms of welfare, and analyze the effects of better information. Surprisingly, increasing signal accuracy may be welfare decreasing.Received: 24 March 2004, Revised: 19 November 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D82. Correspondence to: C. Robert ClarkWe would like to thank Ig Horstmann, Gilbert Laporte, Andrew Leach, Matthias Messner, Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné, Howard Thomas, Nicholas Yannelis, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. The first author wishes to acknowledge the Strategic Research Grant he received from HEC Montreal for this project.     

GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY AND EXPENDITURE IN THE RENT‐SEEKING INDUSTRY: THE CASE OF JAPAN FOR 1998–2004

Since the end of the 1990s, local governments in Japan have enacted Information Disclosure Ordinances, which require the disclosure of official government information. This article uses Japanese prefecture‐level data for the period 1998–2004 to examine how this enactment affected the rate of government construction expenditure. The Dynamic Panel model is used to control for unobserved prefecture‐specific effects and endogenous bias. The major finding is that disclosure of government information reduces the rate of government construction expenditure. This implies that information disclosure reduces losses from rent‐seeking activity, which is consistent with public choice theory. (JEL D73, D78, H79)     

Demand Uncertainty, Incomplete Markets, and the Optimality of Rationing

When the arrival of traders at the market is stochastic, and it is impossible for traders who might arrive to meet ex ante, then Walrasian spot-market clearing presents consumers with price-risk and is typically not Pareto optimal. Instead, with an indivisible good and a divisible numeraire, the first-best can be achieved by an “Exchange” selling raffle tickets at a fixed price. When only spot market trading is feasible and consumers cannot commit to pay unless they purchase the indivisible good, efficiency implies price-fixing with rationing. Potential disadvantages of black markets and scalping are discussed.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D45, D52, D8.     

Asymmetric information and survival in financial markets

Summary. In the evolutionary setting for a financial market developed by Blume and Easley (1992), we consider an infinitely repeated version of a model á la Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) with asymmetrically informed traders. Informed traders observe the realisation of a payoff relevant signal before making their portfolio decisions. Uninformed traders do not have direct access to this kind of information, but can partially infer it from market prices. As a counterpart for their privileged information, informed traders pay a per period cost. As a result, information acquisition triggers a trade-off in our setting. We prove that, so long as information is costly, uninformed traders survive.JEL Classification Numbers: D50, D82, G14.I am deeply indebted to Luca Anderlini for his helpful guidance. I also benefited from discussion with Larry Blume, David Easley, Jayasri Dutta, Thorsten Hens, Hamid Sabourian, Klaus Reiner Schenk-Hoppé and Hyun Song Shin. Useful comments came from an anonymous referee and participants to seminars in Barcelona, Bielefeld, Cambridge, Manchester, Oxford, Rotterdam, Venice, Zurich, to the PhD Awards Italian tour in Rome, Naples, Padova and Milan, and to ESEM99 and EEA99 in Santiago de Compostela.     

Learning from Others: A Welfare Analysis

This paper considers a smooth and noisy version of the statistical prediction model studied in the herding/informational cascades literature and compares market and optimal learning. The latter is characterized by defining a decentralized welfare benchmark as the solution to an infinite horizonteamproblem. Market behavior involves herding, in the sense that agents put too little weight on their private information for any given precision of public information, and yields underinvestment in the production of public information. However, both market and optimal learning involveslowlearning. Examples of the model include learning by doing, reaching consensus, and consumer learning about quality.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D82, D83.     

Information and efficiency in political stock markets: using computerized markets to predict election results

This study concentrates on four computerized political markets in Germany between 1990 and 1998. While this new method for the prediction of election events worked quite well in the USA it did not perform as well in Germany. Searching for the causes of this distinction it is shown that, in contrast to the findings of Forsythe et al. (1992 Forsythe, R, Nelson, F, Neumann, GR and Wright, J. 1992. Anatomy of an experimental political stock market. American Economic Review, 82: 1142–61.  ), (i) extraordinary profits were achieved less by people who took advantage of other people's anomalies than by those people who acquired an advantage from the existence of asymmetric information, (ii) the marginal trader hypothesis does not hold when applied to German markets, and that (iii) traders relied on public opinion polls. It is argued that these distinctions are caused by the differences in the German and the US voting systems. Additionally, it is shown that to a certain extent (iv) election markets were able to predict the contemporary mood of the electorate without the help of public opinion polls, (v) first of all the informed traders used public opinion polls as a source of information, and (vi) prices themselves became a source of information on which expectations were based.     

Size and information revelation in securities trading

We examine differences in information content between order submission sizes and trade sizes by U.S. equity traders. Increasing (decreasing) order submission (trade) size is reflective of information. The result suggests that better-informed traders want to trade in a large size, but that they engage in stealth trading practices or break larger orders into smaller sizes in order to conceal information. While prior studies tend to narrowly focus on trade executions at the market-centre level, our findings indicate that order submission size varies significantly from trade size and that both sizes are informative about future prices, albeit in an inverse manner.     

INFORMATION AND THE DEMAND FOR CLEAN AIR

This paper examines the relationship between the relocating household's reaction to air quality and its information on environmental quality. The results suggest households exposed to public information on the environment are more responsive to air quality differences if they also are knowledgeable about local environmental conditions. (JEL Q510, R230, D830)     

Market for Information and Identity Disclosure in an Experimental Open Limit Order Book

This paper analyses the effects of pre‐trade transparency on market quality in an experimental open limit order book preceded by a market for information. The design of the trading game is akin to the system in use in an increasing number of financial markets. We find that the disclosure of traders' identities reduces the incentive to acquire information, liquidity and volatility. We also show that a positive relation exists between the proportion of traders buying information and liquidity. The results are consistent with a standard model of price formation where the number of informed traders is endogenous .     

Experimentation with heteroskedastic noise

Conclusion The direction of information with respect to the choice variable can easily change under a general class of distributions. The implication is that, when information is a function of the choice variable, the result of a model may be an outcome of the structure of the uncertainty and not of the existence of uncertainty. Thus, incomplete information does not always have such a clear effect on an agent's decision as previous models have suggested. If such results are key to the conclusions, then the structure of the model should be examined.The model presented here can be used to determine the relationship between information and the choice variable and to derive basic insights into the particular model being examined. It can also be used to eliminate the informational aspect of decisions so as to examine other aspects of a model, e.g., the incentive for information transmission (jamming) and other dynamic aspects (e.g., capital accumulation). Finally, the functional form of the unknown function as well as the error function are inportant in determining the direction of increased information, as the direction of increased noise can be the direction of experimentation.In models ofactive learning orexperimentation with noisy observations, the informativeness of the signal obviously depends on the (not always evident) relationship between the choice variable and the noise. This previously implicit relationship is made explicit by introducing heteroskedastic noise into the model. The general conditions for the informativeness of the signal to beindependent ordecrease with respect to the choice variable are obtained. Furthermore, the model reveals that many of the results in previous models of learning do not arise from what is unknown nor the existence of uncertaintyper se, but rather from how incomplete information is modeled.JEL D42, D83.     

Price efficiency and trading behavior in limit order markets with competing insiders

We study price efficiency and trading behavior in laboratory limit order markets with asymmetrically informed traders. Markets differ in the number of insiders present and in the subset of traders who receive information about the number of insiders present. We observe that price efficiency (i) is the higher the higher the number of insiders in the market but (ii) is unaffected by changes in the subset of traders who know about the number of insiders present. (iii) Independent of the number of insiders, price efficiency increases gradually over time. (iv) The insiders’ information is reflected in prices via limit (market) orders if the asset’s value is inside (outside) the bid-ask spread. (v) In situations where limit and market orders yield positive profits, insiders clearly prefer market orders, indicating a strong desire for immediate transactions.     

Money in the pure consumption loan model

The purpose of this paper is to show how modern techniques of Temporary competitive equilibrium analysis can be applied to models of the “pure consumption loan model” type. One considers Samuelson's simplest model where traders live two periods and where money is the only store of value. It is proved that a temporary equilibrium exists if price expectations are sufficiently independent of current prices. A stationary market equilibrium is shown to exist if there is a set of traders (i) whose total resources are greater when they are young than when they are old, (ii) who are indifferent between present and future consumption. It is proved that this existence theorem still holds if the economy is sufficiently “close” to an economy which has this property. A stationary market equilibrium is shown to be Pareto optimal if all traders hold positive cash balances. It may be inefficient if this condition is not satisfied, for some traders may then be willing to borrow, which they cannot do in this model.     

Strategic freedom, constraint, and symmetry in one-period markets with cash and credit payment

Summary. In order to explain in a systematic way why certain combinations of market, financial, and legal structures may be intrinsic to certain capabilities to exchange real goods, we introduce criteria for abstracting the qualitative functions of markets. The criteria involve the number of strategic freedoms the combined institutions, considered as formalized strategic games, present to traders, the constraints they impose, and the symmetry with which those constraints are applied to the traders. We pay particular attention to what is required to make these strategic market games well-defined, and to make various solutions computable by the agents within the bounds on information and control they are assumed to have. As an application of these criteria, we present a complete taxonomy of the minimal one-period exchange economies with symmetric information and inside money. A natural hierarchy of market forms is observed to emerge, in which institutionally simpler markets are often found to be more suitable to fewer and less-diversified traders, while the institutionally richer markets only become functional as the size and diversity of their users gets large.Received: 5 June 2003, Revised: 18 November 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C7, G10, G20, L10, D40, D50. Correspondence to: Eric SmithEric Smith, Martin Shubik: We are grateful to Lloyd Shapley, Duncan Foley, and Doyne Farmer for discussions in the course of this work.     

Conservative traders,natural selection and market efficiency

This paper examines the impact of conservative traders on market efficiency in an evolutionary model of a commodity futures market. This paper shows that the long-run market outcome is informationally efficient, as long as in every period there is a positive probability that entering traders are more conservative than their predecessors. Conservative traders are those who correctly predict the spot price with a positive probability, and more importantly, who in their mistakes err on the side of caution, and rarely overpredict the spot price as buyers, and underpredict the spot price as sellers. This result does not require entry of traders with better information than their predecessors.