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Much ado about making money: the impact of disclosure, news and rumors on the formation of security market prices over time

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Abstract

This article develops an agent-based model of security market pricing process, capable to capture main stylised facts. It features collective market pricing mechanisms based upon evolving heterogenous expectations that incorporate signals of security issuer fundamental performance over time. Distinctive signaling sources on this performance correspond to institutional mechanisms of information diffusion. These sources differ by duration effect (temporary, persistent, and permanent), confidence, and diffusion degree among investors over space and time. Under full and immediate diffusion and balanced reaction by all the investors, the value content of these sources is expected to be consistently and timely integrated by the market price process, implying efficient pricing. By relaxing these quite heroic conditions, we assess the impact of distinctive information sources over market price dynamics, through financial systemic properties such as market price volatility, exuberance and errancy, as well as market liquidity. Our simulation analysis shows that transient information shocks can have permanent effects through mismatching reactions and self-reinforcing feedbacks, involving mispricing in both value and timing relative to the efficient market price series. This mispricing depends on both the information diffusion process and the ongoing information confidence mood among investors over space and time. We illustrate our results through paradigmatic cases of stochastic news, before generalising them to autocorrelated news. Our results are further corroborated by robustness checks over the parameter space and across several market trading mechanisms.

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Notes

  1. Since the news flow shock \(N_t\) disappears by \(t=290\), the market price series \(p_t\) and the fundamental signal \(FF_t\) are supposed to converge during the last 10 periods (\(290 \le t \le 300\)).

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Correspondence to Yuri Biondi.

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Yuri Biondi is Research Director and Member of the Executive Committee of the Labex ReFi (Financial Regulation Lab), ESCP Europe, 79 avenue de la Republique, Paris 75011, France, http://www.labex-refi.com/en/. Simone Righi gratefully acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 648693), support from the “Lendület” Program of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and from the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA K 112929). Both authors thank ESCP-Europe Business School for the financial support to the project Effects of localized social and cognitive interactions under alternative financial regulation regimes on Financial Market Prices Dynamics: Numerical simulation and experimental analyses, granted through the ESCP Europe Research Funding for a visiting professor position.

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Biondi, Y., Righi, S. Much ado about making money: the impact of disclosure, news and rumors on the formation of security market prices over time. J Econ Interact Coord 15, 333–362 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11403-017-0201-8

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