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

研究团队包括加州理工大学和弗吉尼亚理工大学的研究人员，他们在经济学和认知神经科学方面拥有专业知识。他们将研究人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进行市场设计，鼓励市场泡沫的形成，即为资产支付的价格远远高于资产实际价值的时期。他们想要确定，以高“泡沫”价格买入的交易员是否与其他更为谨慎的买家有系统性的不同。他们将使用大脑成像技术，并分析结果数据，以测试神经活动是否能预测气泡会变得多大，以及气泡会持续多久。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于金融市场监管非常重要。该项目研究交易员类型的行为生态，预测泡沫何时形成和破裂，以及泡沫期间的神经活动。对于经济学来说，该项目通过帮助我们理解人们为什么以及如何参与泡沫，有助于我们对泡沫动力学的科学理解。对于认知神经科学来说，研究资产价格是推动理解大脑如何计算复杂的动态值的科学的一种方式，该值随着时间的推移而根据其他人的反应而变化。行为观察和神经测量的结合将为我们提供数据，帮助我们更好地理解情绪(如非理性繁荣)、社会影响(如羊群行为)和动量交易都如何影响资产市场。

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.