Some Preliminary Experiments with the Financial "Toy-Room"
Abstract
We describe some preliminary experiments realized with Financial "Toy-Room" (a micro-founded simulation environment for decentralized trade in a homogeneous financial asset). The experiments are aimed at testing the system, and exploring its flexibility in depicting specific contexts as sub-cases. For this purpose, we selected an issue that has been widely investigated in the literature: the existence and characterization of markets in which prices are (or are believed to be) "quality signals" passing information from informed to uninformed traders. In our out-of-equilibrium simulation analysis, we take agents to trade based on a "spread rule," and introduce "dis-synchronization" in agents' updating processes. Thus, we investigate how dis-synchronization, updating paces and spreads affect persistence of trade and the time-path of prices in extreme regimes (i.e. when all agents are informed, or all agents are uninformed).