Tuesday 20 March 2018

Stock market and auction


I am thinking about the similarities between auctions and stock markets. I think stock market is like two auctions happening at the same time that there is one auction for investors to bet for buying stocks and there is another auction for investors to bet for selling stocks. Investors on the sell side want to sell their stocks at as high price as possible and investors on the buy side want to buy their stocks at as low price as possible. Though the stock market can be seen as a simple perfectly competitive market, but if we look into one small time period, we would be able to see a small auction. When one side's willingness dominate the other's, it will lose market power and they will be bidders. However, it is possible to someone else to enter the market and break the dominated side's market power and make the both sides even again. Moreover, they are auctions with common values that investors value their stocks depending on each other's evaluation. For an auction with common values, there does not exist an equilibrium, this could help to explain the volatility in the stock market, since there is no equilibrium strategy in the stock market, given the property of common values.

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