Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-20-2022
Abstract
In retrospect, the experimental findings on competitive market behavior called for a revival of the old, classical, view of competition as a collective higgling and bargaining process (as opposed to price-taking behaviors) founded on reservation prices (in place of the utility function). In this paper, we specialize the classical methodology to deal with speculation, an important impediment to price stability. The model involves typical features of a field or lab asset market setup and lends itself to an experimental test of its specific predictions; here we use the model to explain three general stylized facts, well established both empirically and experimentally: the excess, fat-tailed, and clustered volatility of speculative asset prices. The fat tails emerge in the model from the amplifying nature of speculation, leading to a random-coefficient autoregressive return process (and power-law tails); the volatility clustering is due to the traders’ long memory of news; bubbles are a persistent phenomenon in the model, and, assuming the standard lab present value pattern, the bubble size increases with the proportion of speculators and decreases with the trading horizon.
Recommended Citation
Published version:
Inoua, S. M., & Smith, V. L. (2023). A classical model of speculative asset price dynamics. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 37, 100780. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2022.100780
Working version:
Inoua, S. M., & Smith, V. L. (2021). A classical model of speculative asset price dynamics. ESI Working Paper 21-21. https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/esi_working_papers/358/
Working Paper version
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
ESI Working Paper 21-21
This paper later underwent peer review and was published in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, volume 37, in 2023.
The additional files contains the working paper version of this article. It was also previously titled "Re-tradable Assets, Speculation, and Economic Instability".