Collective Behavior of Market Participants during Abrupt Stock Price Changes

Under uncertainty, human and animal collectives often respond stochastically to events they encounter. Human or animal individuals behave depending on others’ actions, and sometimes follow choices that are sub-optimal for individuals. Such mimetic behaviors are enhanced during emergencies, creating collective behavior of a group. A stock market that is about to crash, as markets did immediately after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, provides illustrative examples of such behaviors. We provide empirical evidence proving the existence of collective behavior among stock market participants in emergent situations. We investigated the resolution of extreme supply-and-demand order imbalances by increased balancing counter orders: buy and sell orders for excess supply and demand respectively, during times of price adjustment, so-called special quotes on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Counter orders increase positively depending on the quantity of revealed counter orders: the accumulated orders in the book until then. Statistics of the coming counter order are well described using a logistic regression model with the ratio of revealed orders until then to the finally revealed orders as the explanatory variable. Results given here show that the market participants make Bayesian estimations of optimal choices to ascertain whether to order using information about orders of other participants.