Media Frenzies in Markets for Financial Information

Media Frenzies in Markets for Financial Information

Promising emerging equity markets often witness investment herds and frenzies, accompanied by an abundance of media coverage. Complementarity in information acquisition can explain these anomalies. Because information has a high fixed cost of production, its equilibrium price is low when quantity is high. Investors all buy the most popular information because it has the lowest price. Given two ...

Markets for Financial Information

Buying frenzies in durable-goods markets

We explain why a durable-goods monopolist would like to create a shortage during the launch phase of a new product. We argue that this incentive arises from the presence of a second-hand market and uncertainty about consumers' willingness to pay for the good. Consumers are heterogeneous and initially uninformed about their valuations but learn about them over time. Given demand uncertainty, fir...

Information Dispersion in Financial Markets

Public disclosures can level information asymmetry in financial markets by removing informed traders’ advantage, or can exacerbate asymmetry by further increasing these traders’ knowledge of the firm. This study finds evidence of the latter phenomenon in earnings conference calls, where management releases new information, and financial analysts on the call immediately respond and question mana...

Information Communication in Financial Markets∗

Empirical evidence shows word-of-mouth communication has real effects on trading patterns in financial markets. On top of that, the social network through which the information conveys also plays a crucial role. We propose a framework that allows informed traders to directly and truthfully communicate information in four major social interaction structures represented by circle, tree, star and ...