IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/physics-0606078.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Apparent Madness of Crowds: Irrational collective behavior emerging from interactions among rational agents

Author

Listed:
  • Sitabhra Sinha

Abstract

Standard economic theory assumes that agents in markets behave rationally. However, the observation of extremely large fluctuations in the price of financial assets that are not correlated to changes in their fundamental value, as well as the extreme instance of financial bubbles and crashes, imply that markets (at least occasionally) do display irrational behavior. In this paper, we briefly outline our recent work demonstrating that a market with interacting agents having bounded rationality can display price fluctuations that are {\em quantitatively} similar to those seen in real markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Sitabhra Sinha, 2006. "The Apparent Madness of Crowds: Irrational collective behavior emerging from interactions among rational agents," Papers physics/0606078, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:physics/0606078
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0606078
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Garber, Peter M, 1990. "Famous First Bubbles," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 4(2), pages 35-54, Spring.
    2. P. Gopikrishnan & M. Meyer & L.A.N. Amaral & H.E. Stanley, 1998. "Inverse cubic law for the distribution of stock price variations," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 3(2), pages 139-140, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Paulo M.M. Rodrigues & Rita Fradique Lourenço, 2015. "House prices: bubbles, exuberance or something else? Evidence from euro area countries," Working Papers w201517, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    2. Philip Hans Franses & Wouter Knecht, 2016. "The late 1970s bubble in Dutch collectible postage stamps," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 50(4), pages 1215-1228, June.
    3. White, Reilly & Marinakis, Yorgos & Islam, Nazrul & Walsh, Steven, 2020. "Is Bitcoin a currency, a technology-based product, or something else?," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).
    4. Aoki, Masanao, 2002. "Open models of share markets with two dominant types of participants," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 49(2), pages 199-216, October.
    5. Y. Malevergne & D. Sornette, 2003. "VaR-Efficient Portfolios for a Class of Super- and Sub-Exponentially Decaying Assets Return Distributions," Papers physics/0301009, arXiv.org.
    6. Queirós, Francisco, 2024. "Asset bubbles and product market competition," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 19(1), January.
    7. Caner Demir, 2019. "Macroeconomic Determinants of Stock Market Fluctuations: The Case of BIST-100," Economies, MDPI, vol. 7(1), pages 1-14, February.
    8. Lucy F. Ackert & Bryan K. Church & Richard Deaves, 2002. "Bubbles in experimental asset markets: Irrational exuberance no more," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2002-24, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    9. Klein, A. & Urbig, D. & Kirn, S., 2008. "Who Drives the Market? Estimating a Heterogeneous Agent-based Financial Market Model Using a Neural Network Approach," MPRA Paper 14433, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Y. Malevergne & D. Sornette, 2003. "Testing the Gaussian copula hypothesis for financial assets dependences," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(4), pages 231-250.
    11. John Conlon, 2005. "Should Central Banks Burst Bubbles?," Game Theory and Information 0508007, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Peng Yue & Qing Cai & Wanfeng Yan & Wei-Xing Zhou, 2020. "Information flow networks of Chinese stock market sectors," Papers 2004.08759, arXiv.org.
    13. Lucy F. Ackert & Narat Charupat & Bryan K. Church & Richard Deaves, 2006. "Margin, Short Selling, and Lotteries in Experimental Asset Markets," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 73(2), pages 419-436, October.
    14. Michele Costola & Massimiliano Caporin, 2016. "Rational Learning For Risk-Averse Investors By Conditioning On Behavioral Choices," Annals of Financial Economics (AFE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 11(01), pages 1-26, March.
    15. Ichiki, Shingo & Nishinari, Katsuhiro, 2015. "Simple stochastic order-book model of swarm behavior in continuous double auction," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 420(C), pages 304-314.
    16. Robert E. Hall, 2001. "Struggling to Understand the Stock Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(2), pages 1-11, May.
    17. Alberto Ciacci & Takumi Sueshige & Hideki Takayasu & Kim Christensen & Misako Takayasu, 2020. "The microscopic relationships between triangular arbitrage and cross-currency correlations in a simple agent based model of foreign exchange markets," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(6), pages 1-19, June.
    18. Jonathan E. Alevy & Michael S. Haigh & John List, 2006. "Information Cascades: Evidence from An Experiment with Financial Market Professionals," NBER Working Papers 12767, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    19. Guevara Hidalgo, Esteban, 2017. "Bin size independence in intra-day seasonalities for relative prices," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 468(C), pages 722-732.
    20. Michael Demmler & Amilcar Orlian Fernández Domínguez, 2021. "Bitcoin and the South Sea Company: A comparative analysis," Revista Finanzas y Politica Economica, Universidad Católica de Colombia, vol. 13(1), pages 197-224, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:physics/0606078. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.