Decoding Social Influence and the Wisdom of the Crowd in Financial Trading Network

In this paper, we study roles of social mechanisms in a financial system. Our data come from a novel on-line foreign exchange trading brokerage for individual investors, which also allows investors to form social network ties between each other and copy others' trades. From the dataset, we anal...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pan, Wei, Altshuler, Yaniv, Pentland, Alex Paul
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2013
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/80764
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8053-9983
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3410-9587
Description
Summary:In this paper, we study roles of social mechanisms in a financial system. Our data come from a novel on-line foreign exchange trading brokerage for individual investors, which also allows investors to form social network ties between each other and copy others' trades. From the dataset, we analyze the dynamics of this connected social influence systems in decision making processes. We discover that generally social trades outperform individual trades, but the social reputation of the top traders is not completely determined by their performance due to social feedback even when users are betting their own money. We also find that social influence plays a significant role in users' trades, especially decisions during periods of uncertainty. We report evidences suggesting that the dynamics of social influence contribute to market overreaction.