Collaborative Research: Understanding and Predicting Asset Price Bubbles from Brain Activity

合作研究：通过大脑活动理解和预测资产价格泡沫

• 批准号: 1260874
• 负责人: P. Read Montague
• 金额: $ 22.42万
• 依托单位: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-09-15 至 2017-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1260874&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Understanding; Predicting; Asset

The research team includes researchers at Caltech and Virginia Tech with expertise in Economics and Cognitive Neuroscience. They will study how the human brain works when faced with the tasks that are part of buying and selling in asset markets. They plan to use lab experiments with market designs that encourage the formation of market bubbles, periods where the price paid for an asset is well above the actual value of the asset. They want to determine whether traders who buy at high "bubble" prices are systematically different than other more cautious buyers. They will use brain imaging techniques and analyze the resulting data to test whether neural activity can predict how large a bubble will become and how long it will last. Because market bubbles can have serious consequences on the broader economy, understanding more about the possible causes of bubbles is important for financial market regulation. The project studies the behavioral ecology of trader types, predictive 'decoding' of when bubbles will form and crash, and neural activity during bubbles. For economics, the project contributes to our scientific understanding of bubble dynamics by helping us understand why and how people participate in bubbles. For cognitive neuroscience, studying asset prices is one way to advance the science of understanding how the brain computes a complex dynamic value that changes over time depending on the reactions of others. The combination of behavioral observation and neural measures will give us data that will help us better understand how emotions such as 'irrational exuberance', social influences like 'herd behavior', and momentum trading all affect asset markets.

该研究团队包括加州理工学院和弗吉尼亚理工大学的研究人员，他们拥有经济学和认知神经科学方面的专业知识。他们将研究人类大脑在面对资产市场买卖任务时是如何工作的。他们计划使用实验室实验，通过市场设计鼓励市场泡沫的形成，即为资产支付的价格远高于资产的实际价值的时期。他们想确定在高“泡沫”价格买入的交易员是否与其他更谨慎的买家有系统性的不同。他们将使用大脑成像技术并分析由此产生的数据，以测试神经活动是否可以预测泡沫将变得多大以及持续多久。由于市场泡沫可能对更广泛的经济产生严重后果，因此更多地了解泡沫的可能原因对金融市场监管至关重要。该项目研究交易者类型的行为生态学，预测泡沫何时形成和崩溃的“解码”，以及泡沫期间的神经活动。对于经济学，该项目有助于我们科学地理解泡沫动力学，帮助我们理解人们为什么以及如何参与泡沫。对于认知神经科学来说，研究资产价格是推进理解大脑如何计算复杂动态价值的科学的一种方式，这种价值会随着时间的推移而变化，这取决于他人的反应。行为观察和神经测量的结合将为我们提供数据，帮助我们更好地了解“非理性繁荣”等情绪，“羊群行为”等社会影响以及动量交易如何影响资产市场。