Market Dynamics,Programmed Traders and Futures Markets: Beginning the Laboratory Search for a Smoking Gun

Recent events have caused a re-examination of the role of programmed traders and futures markets in generating destabilizing price movements. Laboratory experiments provide an ideal environment to isolate their effects on behaviour. In a new series of experiments we find that program traders and futures markets can be crucial for ensuring the informational efficiency of the spot market, even when the former are active participants in bubbles and crashes