We investigate the impact of an exogenous environment on the emergence of social herding of economic sentiment. An interactions-driven dynamics of economic sentiment is modeled by an Ising model on a large (two-dimensional) square lattice. The individual states are called optimism and pessimism. The exogenous environment is modeled as a sequence of random events, which might have a positive or ...

Many scholars express concerns that herding behaviour causes excess volatility, destabilises financial markets, and increases the likelihood of systemic risk. We use a special formof the Strongly TypedGenetic Programming (STGP) technique to evolve a stockmarket divided into two groups—a small subset of artificial agents called ‘Best Agents’ and a main cohort of agents named ‘All Agents’. The ‘B...

Hierarchical crowdsourcing networks (HCNs) provide a useful mechanism for social mobilization. However, spontaneous evolution of the complex resource allocation dynamics can lead to undesirable herding behaviours in which a small group of reputable workers are overloaded while leaving other workers idle. Existing herding control mechanisms designed for typical crowdsourcing systems are not effe...

My research on bubbles started with my book “Asymmetric Information: Bubbles, Crashes, Technical Analysis and Herding” (Oxford University Press, 2001). The book surveys and critiques the literature on bubbles and herding in settings in which different investors hold different information. One conclusion of the book is that it is difficult to obtain bubbles in models in which all market particip...

My research on bubbles started with my book “Asymmetric Information: Bubbles, Crashes, Technical Analysis and Herding” (Oxford University Press, 2001). The book surveys and critiques the literature on bubbles and herding in settings in which different investors hold different information. One conclusion of the book is that it is difficult to obtain bubbles in models in which all market particip...

BACKGROUND Gender differences in cardiovascular diseases (CVD) among the Sami have been reported previously. The aim of the present study was to investigate the incidence of and mortality from stroke, subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH), and acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in the Swedish Sami population between 1985 and 2002, and to analyse the potential impact of income and level of education on ...

This paper studies herding behavior of institutional investors in international markets. First, we document the existence of wide-spread herding in 41 countries (referred to as ‘‘target countries’’ hereafter) in the sample. We then examine the relation between contemporaneous institutional demand and future returns and find that institutional herding stabilizes prices. Next, we examine the rela...

While herding has long been suspected to play a role in financial market booms and busts, theoretical analyses have struggled to identify conclusive causes for the effect. Recent theoretical work shows that informational herding is possible in a market with efficient asset prices if information is bi-polar, and contrarianism is possible with single-polar information. We present an experimental ...

In this paper, we describe work that begins to address some of the issues related to developing an autonomous mobile robotic capability to assist humans with herding animals. A novel aspect of this work is the development of a capability to convey instructions to the robot via movements of a “toy human.” In this work, no other explicit form of communication from the human to the robot is requir...

This paper studies the investment behavior and performance of contrarian mutual funds, as well as the performance of stocks widely held and traded by such funds over the 1994 to 2006 period. We define a “contrarian fund” as a fund that trades in a direction opposite to mutual fund “herds” much more frequently than the average fund. We find that contrarian funds tend to persist in trading agains...