Most financial markets operate as double auction markets in which buyers and sellers submit limit and market orders. In this case the traders have to decide firstly whether they want to submit a buy or sell order and then secondly what the limit price of this order is. In this thesis I develop further a theoretical model based on Chatterjee and Samuelson (1983) in which two traders trade with each other in a double auction market. Assuming that both traders assign a private value to the asset they are trading, which is known only to them but not their trading partner, I determine whether the traders should submit a buy or sell order and what the optimal limit price should be. I develop a single-period model in which traders only trade once and thus cannot learn each other’s private values from trading as well as a multi-period model that allows to infer to some degree the other trader’s private value from their order submission behavior. Using this theoretical model as a benchmark, I then conducted experiments with students to evaluate whether the actual behavior of students fits the theory developed. Although we find that in general the behavior of traders is consistent with the proposed theory, there are some significant differences. Most notably traders seem to underreact to differences in their own private value, i.e. do not adjust their limit price to the extend suggested by theory. I evaluate these outcomes in light of results established results in behavioral finance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:518124 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Li, Honghong |
| Contributors | Krause, Andreas |
| Publisher | University of Bath |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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