Transaction Costs and Market Efficiency

Previous research suggests that a decline in transactions costs leads to improved economic efficiency. In this paper, we show that such a decline will introduce increasingly uninformed consumers into established markets. Using a model of financial market inefficiency, we show that this increase in uninformed individuals can increase market risk (volatility), can decrease efficiency, and may reduce social welfare even when market participants are perfectly rational. We then test the predictions of our model using data on the retail equities market. Our results suggest that securities that have a large proportion of small trades (presumably disproportionately from small, online retail investors) tend to be less efficient by conventional measures, consistent with our model predictions. Keywords: eCommerce, transaction costs, market efficiency. INTRODUCTION The effects of a decline on transactions costs on the structure and performance of organizations and markets has been a central theme in the information systems literature for many years (Gurbaxani and Whang 1991; Malone et al. 1987). For the most part, research on this topic suggests that lower transactions costs are almost always beneficial. Reductions in transactions costs have been linked to direct cost savings, indirect benefits through improvements in agency costs, monitoring or coordination within existing organizations and markets, and even the creation of new types of market structures that are more efficient (Clemons and Row 1992; Malone and Rockart 1991). A few studies have considered negative effects of reduced transactions costs, especially on intermediaries, but even here the replacement of traditional intermediaries with electronic interaction is socially beneficial, even if it reduces the profitability of existing intermediaries (Clemons and Weber 1994). However, not all reductions in transactions costs need be beneficial. For instance, classic economic problems such as the “lemons problem” (Akerlof 1973) can be exacerbated if lower transactions costs lead some participants to become more informed than others. Alternatively, reduced transactions costs may introduce new, poorly informed participants into markets that they would otherwise access through a professional intermediary who would screen or temper their information disadvantages. To the extent that market efficiency is affected by the introduction of less uninformed participants, a reduction in transactions costs can impede market efficiency and create real social costs. Gu & Hitt/Transaction Costs and Market Efficiency In addition to financial markets, these concepts apply generally to auction markets, markets with imperfect price discrimination mechanisms, or those with participation externalities. Detailed discussions can be found in Delong et al. (1990) and in Lee et al. (1991). 86 2001 — Twenty-Second International Conference on Information Systems While this problem is quite general in any market where a consumer’s price is affected by other consumers’ information sets, it is potentially of greatest importance in financial markets, especially in the retail equities markets. For as low as $5 per trade, anyone can trade stock using a web browser—a cost reduction of as much as a factor of 150 from full service brokerage rates, and perhaps a factor of 30 from traditional discount brokerage rates. With the growth of on-line brokerage (currently at about 29 million accounts—Credit Suisse First Boston 2001) there has been an even greater proliferation of online financial information services ranging from investor chat (e.g., RagingBull.com) to sophisticated analytics for options and derivatives. The combination of plentiful investment information and easy access to trading services has created a “trading boom” among small, retail investors. While more information may make retail investors better informed, retail investors still have a strong information disadvantage relative to market professionals and may show “overconfidence,” causing them to make worse trading decisions (Barber and Odeon 2001). Studies show that investors with access to online trading trade more frequently (Choi et al. 2001) with lower total returns (Barber and Odean 2001) than investors who lack online access. However, the impact of these investors on market efficiency has not been previously addressed. Economists have long believed that irrational or less informed investors (“noise traders”) have no impact on asset prices and, therefore, will have no effect on market efficiency. Fama (1965) argued that “sophisticated investors … will trade against [less informed] ones and drive prices close to intrinsic values.” Moreover, in the course of such trading, the less informed investors will lose money and eventually be weeded from the market. However, these arguments depend critically on the assumption that informed investors can fully arbitrage against the noise traders, which, as Black (1986) pointed out, only holds when the informed investors have unlimited financial resources and infinite time horizons. In real financial markets, there are at least two factors that limit informed investors’ arbitrage behavior (see Delong et al. 1990; Lee et al. 1991). First, many market professionals are measured and compensated on short run performance in managing a finite portfolio. As a result, they may be unwilling to engage in arbitrage requiring significant time or open-ended financial commitments. For instance, at the peak of the stock market a few years ago, CNBC interviewed a number of experienced mutual fund managers. Almost all of them agreed that eCommerce stocks were significantly over-valued, but none of them were willing to short sell these stocks for fear that they could rise further for a long period before falling back to the intrinsic value. For managers measured by quarterly performance, the risks were simply too high to justify the arbitrage. Second, because shortselling shares is subject to different costs, margin requirements, and regulatory restrictions than taking long positions (buying shares), this deters managers from taking short positions even when they believe shares are overvalued. Based on these intuitions, DeLong et al. (1990) developed a model demonstrating that “arbitrage does not eliminate the effect of noise because noise itself creates risk [under finite time horizons]” (emphasis in original). As a result, the assets become less attractive to informed investors and prices become lower. Thus, both noise traders and informed investors will expect higher returns and higher risks (volatility) in this market. We consider the effects of declining transactions costs on the performance of financial and other information intensive markets. In the first part of the paper, we develop a simple model that links declining transactions costs to an increase in direct market participation by less informed investors (who no longer have intermediaries to compensate for their information disadvantages). This model also shows a decline in margins for intermediaries. While this is intuitive, the model is interesting because it generates these results with few assumptions. Then, building on the model developed by DeLong et al., we consider the problem that an increase in participation by uninformed investors creates on overall market efficiency. This model generates a specific set of testable predictions that we examine using data on the price behavior of recent initial public offerings (IPOs), a set of stocks that is particularly favored by online traders. While our empirical measures of various model constructs are far from perfect, we do find evidence that stocks heavily traded by in small lots (presumably by retail investors, especially those online) tend to show greater violations of standard indicators of market efficiency. Our work is related to research on market price variance and flows of market information (Barclay et al. 1990; Charles et al. 1994), but differs in that we consider the impact of changing the balance of informed and uninformed investors rather than the effects of the arrival of new information. It differs from classical transaction cost approaches in that it incorporates the issue of market efficiency in addition to market structure. Our work is most closely related to research on market inefficiency, although we propose a specific process by which uninformed investors are introduced into the market. Gu & Hitt/Transaction Costs and Market Efficiency While the model is built for a monopolistic agent, results are qualitatively similar as long as competition is imperfect. The hazard function of distribution F(θ) is: f(θ)/[1 – F(θ)]. This is because under CARA utility and normally distributed wealth, expected utility has the form E(U(w)) = E(e) = :w – (Fw where the mean and variance of w are given by ( :w , Fw). 2001 — Twenty-Second International Conference on Information Systems 87 MODEL Model: Intermediary Fees and Investor Participation We consider a market with products of uncertain values with two types of market participants: individuals and a monopolistic professional agent. An individual can either access the market directly (incurring a transaction cost) or can use the agent by paying a fixed fee. Agents are risk neutral, face zero transactions costs, and have perfect information regarding the value of the underlying good (a probability distribution). Individuals are risk-averse, face positive transaction costs, and have worse information regarding valuation of the available assets than the agent (in the form of a mean-preserving spread of the true distribution). Formally, we make the following assumptions: 1. The true value V of the product is normally distributed with mean θ and variance σ2θ. For individual i, a noise of εi ∼ N(0, σι) is mixed in the perceived information of the value. The exact value of σ 2 ι is private information to the individual (i), while the distribution of σι, F(σ ), is known to the agent. The hazard function of F(σ) is monotonically increasing. 2. Each individual’s utility is a constant absolute risk aversion (CARA) function: U = e-(2γ)w where ( is the coefficient of absolute risk aversion. Without loss of generality, ( is set to 1 for all individuals, since σi alone is sufficient to represent individual differences. 3. The individual incurs a transaction cost of Ct if accessing the market directly, and pays a fee to the agent of Cf if using the agent (but no additional transaction costs). The expected utility of each choice is calculated as follows: Choice 1: No purchase. E(U1) = 0; Choice 2: Purchase directly on the market: U2 = V + εi Ct; where V ∼ (θ, σ2θ), εi ∼ (0, σ 2 i), thus E(U2) = θ σi σ2θ Ct Choice 3: Purchase through the agent: U2 = V Cf; where V ∼ (θ, σ2θ), thus E(U3) = θ σ2θ Cf Individuals choose the transaction medium that provides the highest expected utility. We first consider the agents participation constraint and then characterize optimal pricing by the agent. Gu & Hitt/Transaction Costs and Market Efficiency 88 2001 — Twenty-Second International Conference on Information Systems Proposition 1: If , all individuals will participate in the market (either via the agent or directly), otherwise no 2 θ σ θ > individuals will participate. Proof: See Appendix. As a consequence, we restrict ourselves to conditions where individuals do purchase and the problem reduces to a choice of channel (direct vs. intermediated). Proposition 2 provides the optimal pricing choice for the agent. Proposition 2: There is a unique solution of Cf defined by that maximizes the agent’s profit. ) ( * 1 * t f f C C H C − = − Proof: See Appendix. With these results, it is straightforward to compute the comparative statistics of agent pricing as transactions cost change: Proposition 3: When individuals’ direct transaction cost decreases, the agent reduces its fee Cf but the price difference between the transaction cost and the agent’s fee increases. Proof: See Appendix. These results collectively suggest that as transactions costs decline, the agent receives less revenue and a smaller share of transactions, even when agents have a cost advantage in accessing the market and better information than individuals. Using intermediate results from the previous proofs, we can also examine how participating in these markets is affected by transactions costs. We find that as transactions costs decline, individuals increase their use of the market, which results in an increase in overall degree of “uninformedness” (defined as the average amount of noise variance in their estimates of value) of the individuals that access the markets directly. Corollary 3.1: When the individual’s direct transaction cost decreases, less informed individuals enter into the market directly. The average “uninformedness” of all direct participants increases. Proof: See Appendix. The latter results hold as long as individuals’ assessment of information is not substantially improved by direct market access or improved concurrently with direct market access due to other factors. Empirical research suggests that individual trading behavior is consistent with this assertion. It has been shown that research activity by retail investors does not increase investment performance (Barber and Odean 2001; Choi et al. 2001). Our results, therefore, suggest that declining transactions costs will be associated with an overall reduction in the informedness of traders in the market. In the next section, we consider the implications of this result for market efficiency. For tractability, we restrict individuals to be one of two types: one with better information or lower variance (σL), the other with higher variance (σH) where σL < σH. Let the proportion of individuals with better information be represented by γ. Corollary 3.2: A profit maximizing agent will serve both types of individuals when , and only serve the 2 2 1 H t L t C C σ σ γ + + − > less informed agents otherwise. Proof: See Appendix. As before, as transactions costs decline sufficiently, the market shifts from full intermediation to having the better informed customers accessing the market directly. This corollary is a special case of the previous one under discrete types of individual investors. This simplification allows us to consider direct access by only a single type of consumer in our analysis of market efficiency impact. Gu & Hitt/Transaction Costs and Market Efficiency Our model differs from DSSW in that individuals are aware that their estimates are noisy. Relaxing this assumption strengthens the result. Moreover, we incorporate two types of investors as well as transactions costs, which are not present in the original DSSW model. This corresponds to the situation where individuals with noise σL enter the market directly. 2001 — Twenty-Second International Conference on Information Systems 89 Model: Market Efficiency To examine the impact of increased individual participation on efficiency we consider a variant of the De Long, Shleifer, Summers, and Waldmann (DSSW) model. DSSW considers an overlapping generations setting with an infinite time horizon subdivided into periods. There are two types of individuals, D’s who access the market directly and A’s who utilize agents. Both types of individuals live for two periods. Each period includes both “old” individuals (those from the previous period) and “young” individuals just entering the market, but the total number of customers is constant over time. For young individuals, a proportion α are D’s and 1-α are A’s. For simplicity, we assume that the total number of participants does not change over time. There are two assets with identical dividends (r): a safe asset, s, available in infinite supply, and a risky asset, u, which has a fixed supply and therefore a market price that can vary based on supply and demand. Individuals make holding decisions when they are young to maximize expected utility when they are old. If the market were perfectly efficient, the price of the safe and risky assets would be the same (representing their dividend rates) and there would be no price volatility. However, the presence of uninformed individuals will alter these equilibrium prices. To explicitly model the imperfect information of the individuals, we assume that in each period there is a system-wide noise ρt ~ N(0, σL) on the estimation of expected price of the risky assets. The A’s are able to screen out this noise while the D’s cannot. We can then examine the impact of declining transactions costs on the price variance of the risky asset. Proposition 4: As transactions costs decrease, market prices become more volatile. Proof: See Appendix. While the proof is somewhat involved, the intuition is simple. As transactions costs decline, more individuals enter the market directly. The presence of these imperfectly informed investors creates fluctuation in the demand and supply for the risky asset and, therefore, price fluctuations. This result can be generalized to multiple type investors. Because we know the behavior of prices, we can predict analytically the behavior of standard tests of market efficiency. To test market efficiency, it is common to calculate the first-order autocorrelation coefficient of prices. The weak form of the efficient market hypothesis implies that this autocorrelation should be zero (past prices should not predict future prices). For our model, the first-order autocorrelation is given by: (1) ) , ( ) 1 ( )) ( ( ) , ( 1 2 2 1 t t t t t Cor r C F B p p Cor ρ ρ ∆ ∆ + = ∆ ∆ + + Market autocorrelation is thus a function of the rate of return, the transaction cost (the function B is defined in the proof of Proposition 4), and the autocorrelation of system-wide noise (investor sentiment or other systematic forecast errors). While we cannot measure these factors directly, previous literature has extensively documented the existence of this correlation. Given that this correlation is nonzero, we can derive the relationship between declining transaction costs and this measure of market efficiency: ) , ( )) ( ( ) 1 ( )) ( ( 2 ) , ( 1 2 1 t t t t t t t t Cor dC C F dB r C F B dC p p dCor ρ ρ ∆ ∆ + = ∆ ∆ + + Gu & Hitt/Transaction Costs and Market Efficiency 9 . 0 since , 0 )) ( ( ) 1 ( )) ( ( 2 )) ( ( ) 1 ( )) ( ( 2 * 2 * 2