Understanding Excessive
Risk Taking Seen in
Experiments on Financial
Markets
SYstemic Risk TOmography:
Signals, Measurements, Transmission Channels, and Policy Interventions
Jørgen Vitting Andersen, CNRS, Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, University of Paris 1. CSRA research meeting – December, 15 2014
Understanding Excessive Risk Taking Seen in
Experiments on Financial Markets
• Jørgen Vitting Andersen, CNRS,
Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne,
University of Paris 1.
• Research in progress, collaborators:
Yifang Liu, Philippe de Peretti, Maxim
Frolov, Roberto Savona, Hayette Gatfaoui,
Rania Kaffel
Individual versus collective risk taking
• Individual risks: Men are known to be more risk loving
compared to women. For real market traders see e.g. :
“Endogenous steroids and financial risk on a London
trading floor”, J. M. Coates and J. Herbert, PNAS, V.105,
16, 6167-72 (2008); “A note on trader Sharpe Ratios”, J.
M. Coates and L. Page, PLoSONE, V.4, 11, e8036 (2009)
• Collective risks: how does a group of traders with
heterogeneous risk profiles influence the formation of
market risks?
Setup of experiments
• Before each experiments individual risk profiles of participants were
obtained from lotteries (C. A. Holt, S. Laury, The American Economic
Review, V. 92, 1644 (2002)
Claim: we need a fluctuation based framework in
order to be able to understand behavior seen in
experiments.
Taking the «temperature» of the market: predicting big
price «swings »
• Internal state of water? Insert a thermometer into the
liquid.
• Internal state of market? «slave » an agent based model to
the price evolution.
• Market in a “hot” or “cold” state.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s
Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological
development and demonstration under grant agreement n° 320270
www.syrtoproject.eu
This document reflects only the author’s views.
The European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.