Information Cascades: Evidence from An Experiment with Financial Market Professionals

Alevy is from the Department of Resource Economics at the University of Nevada - Reno, Haigh is from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and List is from the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago and NBER. John Di Clemente, former managing director of research at the Chicago Board of Trade, authorized this study. Also special thanks to CBOT staff Dorothy Ackerman Anderson, Frederick Sturm, and Keith Schap for their incredible support on site. Valuable comments and suggestions were provided by seminar participants at Harvard University, University of Chicago, University of Maryland, George Mason University, American University, University of Nevada at Reno, University of Texas at Dallas, the NCR-134 Conference on Applied Commodity Price Analysis, Forecasting and Market Risk Management (St. Louis, Missouri, April 2003), the Economic Science Association International Conference, (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, July 2003), the Financial Management Association Annual Meeting (New Orleans, October, 2004) and the University of Copenhagen Workshop on Herding (Copenhagen, September, 2005). Nathan Berg, Liesl Koch, Michael Price, Vernon Smith, Georg Weizsacker, and Anthony Ziegelmeyer provided useful comments on the manuscript. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not in any way reflect the views or opinions of the U.S. CFTC. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.