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Trading Under Uncertainty. Ankur Pareek Yale School of Management. Motivation. To study the interaction between arbitrageurs and uninformed investors and measure the ex-ante allocation efficiency of the market.
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Trading Under Uncertainty Ankur Pareek Yale School of Management
Motivation • To study the interaction between arbitrageurs and uninformed investors and measure the ex-ante allocation efficiency of the market. • Provide some insight into validity of some of the theories behind the dotcom bubble: • Ofek and Richardson(2003)- short sales restrictions with heterogeneous beliefs explain the internet stock bubble • Pastor and Veronesi (2006)- high uncertainty in future earnings growth rate explained the existing prices of tech stocks in late 90s • Lamont and Stein (2004) – less arbitrage capital for short-selling in rising overvalued market • Understanding the behavior of arbitrageurs under uncertainty
Experimental Design • Create market for stocks of a technology firm Sysco which is based on single technology still in R&D phase • Three sets of traders with different information sets • Arbitrageurs with perfect information about the final dividend realization • Traders with partial/noisy information about the final dividend. • Uninformed traders • Arbitrageurs faced with uncertainty about when the arbitrage window will close (end of period 4 or period 5) • Three sessions with 4 or 5 periods which vary in final dividend and signal received by partially informed traders.
Timeline for a Trading Session Time 0 No information Time 1 4 traders given Noisy info Time 2 4 traders given Perfect info Time 3 Public announcement Noisy info. announced Time 4 or 5 Dividend paid and trading ends
Experimental Results • Prices did not converge to fundamental values when there was overvaluation in the market in session 1 and session 3 • Consistent with Ofek and Richardson (2003): short sell constraints and heterogeneous beliefs • Traders with noisy private information trade on it aggressively immediately after receiving it but don’t trade on it or reverse some of their trades later • Prices converge close to fundamental value when dividend is high
Experimental Results (contd’) • Arbitrageurs did not sell all their securities before the end of period 4 in low dividend sessions 1 and 3 • Action inconsistent with risk aversion/ risk neutrality of arbitrageurs. • Can be explained by risk loving preferences like prospect theory with convex utility over losses w.r.t some benchmark target profit • Arbitrageurs did not indulge in speculative behavior in most of the cases.
Session 1 summary statistics Session 2 summary statistics
Conclusion • Heterogeneous investors combined with short-sales constraints could lead to persistence of overpricing. • Perfectly informed arbitrageurs more risk-loving compared to investors with noisy information sets. • Investors with partial information risk-averse as shown by their trading behavior. • Arbitrageurs risk taking in final period can only be justified by risk-loving behavior • Difficult for under pricing to persist in a market with arbitrageurs with perfect information. • Future experiments could help in resolving the debates about the existence and reasons behind the dot-com bubble of 1990s.