This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. We study herd behavior in a laboratory financial market with ...

This paper investigates how the pattern of encounters between a firm’s competitors affects the firm’s inclination to follow its competitors into a new market. We theorize that direct encounters between a firm’s rivals lead to a herding effect, making imitative market entry more likely. Past mutual forbearance between a firm’s competitors (resulting from asymmetric multimarket competition) furth...

We study herd behavior in a laboratory financial market with financial market professionals. We compare two treatments: one in which the price adjusts to the order flow in such a way that herding should never occur, and one in which the presence of event uncertainty makes herding possible. In the first treatment, traders seldom herd, in accordance with both the theory and previous experimental ...

Maximum likelihood learning in Markov Random Fields (MRFs) with multiple layers of hidden units is typically performed using contrastive divergence or one of its variants. After learning, samples from the model are generally used to estimate expectations under the model distribution. Recently, Welling proposed a new approach to working with MRFs with a single layer of hidden units. The approach...

We characterize optimal strategies in a simple herding model where observations have a small cost. We assume that there are two states and two possible signals that each agent may get. The prior distribution is biased towards adopting behavior. That is, ex-ante, adopting gives a higher expected utility than not adopting. Contrary to Kultti & Miettinen (2005) herding does not arise deterministic...

We review theory and evidence relating to herd behavior, payo and reputational interactions, social learning, and informational cascades in capital markets. We o er a simple taxonomy of e ects, and evaluate how alternative theories may help explain evidence on the behavior of investors, rms, and analysts. We consider both incentives for parties to engage in herding or cascading, and the incenti...

This paper introduces assets for which the intrinsic value is endogenous to the amount of funding attracted. A Rational Expectations Equilibrium is developed. Additionally, simulations of the model based on bounded rationality explore the different market behavior under fundamental and momentum based investing strategies. Both strategies produce herding characteristics. The herding under the fu...

We study whether herding can arise in a laboratory financial market in which agents trade sequentially. Agents trade an asset whose value is unknown and whose price is efficiently set by a market maker. We show that the presence of a price mechanism destroys the possibility of herding. Most agents follow their private information and prices converge to the fundamental value. This result contras...

Previous research investigating the dynamical processes supporting coordinated joint action has typically used nongoal-directed tasks. The present study expands on this research by investigating the coordination that emerges among pairs in a complex, goal-directed task of herding virtual sheep to the center of a field. The results revealed that the majority of pairs converged on the same stable...