Double Bubbles in Assets Markets with Multiple Generations

We construct an asset market in a finite horizon overlapping-generations environment. Subjects are tested for comprehension of their fundamental value exchange environment, and then reminded during each of 25 periods of its declining new value. We observe price bubbles forming when new generations enter the market with additional liquidity and bursting as old generations exit the market and withdrawing cash. The entry and exit of traders in the market creates an M shaped double bubble price path over the life of the traded asset. This finding is significant in documenting that bubbles can reoccur within one extended trading horizon and, consistent with previous cross-subject comparisons, shows how fluctuations in market liquidity influence price paths. We also find that trading experience leads to price expectations that incorporate fundamental value.Asset Markets, Price Bubbles, Laboratory Experiments, Overlapping Generations

Radio Spectrum and the Disruptive Clarity OF Ronald Coase.

In the Federal Communications Commission, Ronald Coase (1959) exposed deep foundations via normative argument buttressed by astute historical observation. The government controlled scarce frequencies, issuing sharply limited use rights. Spillovers were said to be otherwise endemic. Coase saw that Government limited conflicts by restricting uses; property owners perform an analogous function via the "price system." The government solution was inefficient unless the net benefits of the alternative property regime were lower. Coase augured that the price system would outperform the administrative allocation system. His spectrum auction proposal was mocked by communications policy experts, opposed by industry interests, and ridiculed by policy makers. Hence, it took until July 25, 1994 for FCC license sales to commence. Today, some 73 U.S. auctions have been held, 27,484 licenses sold, and $52.6 billion paid. The reform is a textbook example of economic policy success. We examine Coase‘s seminal 1959 paper on two levels. First, we note the importance of its analytical symmetry, comparing administrative to market mechanisms under the assumption of positive transaction costs. This fundamental insight has had enormous influence within the economics profession, yet is often lost in current analyses. This analytical insight had its beginning in his acclaimed early article on the firm (Coase 1937), and continued into his subsequent treatment of social cost (Coase 1960). Second, we investigate why spectrum policies have stopped well short of the property rights regime that Coase advocated, considering rent-seeking dynamics and the emergence of new theories challenging Coase‘s property framework. One conclusion is easily rendered: competitive bidding is now the default tool in wireless license awards. By rule of thumb, about$17 billion in U.S. welfare losses have been averted. Not bad for the first 50 years of this, or any, Article appearing in Volume II of the Journal of Law & Economics.

Durability, Re-trading and Market Performance

Key differential structural characteristics of environments studied in previous market experiments have documented large divergences in their observed performance, particularly discrepancies in their convergence to expected equilibrium outcomes. We investigate why this should be so. The type of competitive equilibrium where a market clears at a particular price as initiated by Arrow and Debreu (1954) has long been studied in the laboratory. We refer to these experiments as Supply and Demand (SD) experiments. SD experiments are highly reduced in form: items are not re-tradable, buyers and sellers are specialized in these roles, and no second commodity, cash, is used as a medium of exchange, although cash enters as a numeraire qua reward incentive for subjects. Markets with these features that are repeated over time converge rapidly to the predicted equilibrium under a regime of strict private dispersed information on individual values that define the equilibrium predictions. In contrast, consider asset markets, in which shares can be freely re-traded against cash within and across periods, shares have well-defined common values based on common public information on expected cash “dividend” yields, and individuals are not specialized as buyers or sellers. These markets produce price bubbles that converge only with experience across repeat sessions. The prospect of re-trade, and perhaps the lack of buyer/seller specialization, results in market behavior that contrasts sharply with the perishable goods that characterize the SD experiments. Building on this background analysis we report new experiments that combine features of both environments and initiate an investigation of how commodity durability that constrains re-trading characteristics affect the observed variation in market performance.

Price Expectations in Experimental Asset Markets with Futures Contracting

A financial bubble is defined as a condition in which the trading price of an asset is above (and increasing relative to) its discounted present value of earnings, i.e., its fundamental value. Consider the data in Figure 1 where an asset was traded over 15 consecutive trading periods. In the figure, we plot the deviation in mean contract price from the net asset value (NAV) of the security for each of the trading periods. Notice that the price grows steadily, peaks, and then "crashes" to its NAV. There is a puzzle concerning the level of premiums and discounts from NAV for closed-end funds, which provides a challenge to a rational expectations theory of asset pricing, since the data in Figure 1 was generated from an experiment in which the fundamental value of the asset was controlled. There were no external market factors to justify the deviation from fundamental value other than the capital gains expectation of the participants (see smith, Suchanek and Williams [1988] hereafter referred to as SSW). The phenomena describe in Figure 1 is a very standard outcome of a specific experimental asset market that has been replicated over 70 times with diverse subject pools

Price Expectations in Asset Markets with Futures Contracting

Can the introduction of a futures market assist investors in obtaining better price expectations and reduce price bubbles, and is the major determinant of the price bubble the uncertainty of the dividend structure and its effect on noise traders

Futures Contracting and Dividend Uncertainty in Experimental Asset Markets

Prices in experimental asset markets tend to bubble and then crash to dividend value at the end of the asset\u27s useful life. Explanations for this phenomenon are (1) that participants cannot form reliable future price expectations or (2) dividend risk aversion. We report the results of experiments to test these hypotheses. In one experimental series, a futures market is introduced so that participants can obtain information on future share prices. In another series of experiments, the per-period dividend is known with certainty. The futures market treatment had little effect on the character of bubble. The certain dividend treatment had little effect on the character of bubbles with inexperienced traders

Double Bubbles In Assets Markets With Multiple Generations

We construct an asset market in a finite horizon overlapping-generations environment. Subjects are tested for comprehension of their fundamental value exchange environment and then reminded during each of 25 periods of the environment\u27s declining new value. We observe price bubbles forming when new generations enter the market with additional liquidity and bursting as old generations exit the market and withdrawing cash. The entry and exit of traders in the market creates an M shaped double bubble price path over the life of the traded asset. This finding is significant in documenting that bubbles can reoccur within one extended trading horizon and, consistent with previous cross-subject comparisons, shows how fluctuations in market liquidity influence price paths. We also find that trading experience leads to price expectations that incorporate fundamental value