Heterogeneity, spontaneous coordination and extreme events within large-scale and small-scale agent-based financial market models

Authored by Noemi Schmitt, Frank Westerhoff

Date Published: 2017

DOI: 10.1007/s00191-017-0504-x

Sponsors: European Union

Platforms: No platforms listed

Model Documentation: Other Narrative Mathematical description

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

We propose a novel agent-based financial market framework in which speculators usually follow their own individual technical and fundamental trading rules to determine their orders. However, there are also sunspot-initiated periods in which their trading behavior is correlated. We are able to convert our (very) simple large-scale agent-based model into a simple small-scale agent-based model and show that our framework is able to produce bubbles and crashes, excess volatility, fat-tailed return distributions, serially uncorrelated returns and volatility clustering. While lasting volatility outbursts occur if the mass of speculators switches to technical analysis, extreme price changes emerge if sunspots coordinate temporarily the behavior of speculators.
Tags
Agent-based models financial markets Dynamics herd behavior Volatility stylized facts Sunspots Strategies Fluctuations Prices Artificial stock-market Speculative behavior Technical and fundamental analysis Heterogeneity and coordination Sunspots and extreme events Asset pricing-models