Financial Networks in the Field

This project was part of the team project "Social Finance – Finance and the Consumer".

Topic and Objectives

The project aimed to exploit two online trading platforms and an online trading game of a newspaper for use of historical data and implementation of field experiments, similar to those in the lab, in order to identify peer effects in financial behavior. On social trading platforms, the authors planned to explore trading patterns, portfolio-mimicking, and conformism behavior, and to describe social interactions among traders (chatroom) and how they affect investment decisions. They also aimed to validate results from the laboratory setting by running a field experiment on the platform.

This project could not be concluded as intended. The auhtors obtained the data from the social trading platform and ran some preliminary analysis. Despite attempts to collaborate with external experts, they could not make the necessary investment in big data analysis and experimental designs that were required to answer the main research questions. Hence, this project ended without concrete outputs.