Excessive Volatility is Also a Feature of Individual Level Forecasts

Abstract

The excessive volatility of prices in financial markets is one of the most pressing puzzles in social science. It has led many to question economic theory, which attributes beneficial effects to markets in the allocation of risks and the aggregation of information. In exploring its causes, we investigated to what extent excessive volatility can be observed at the individual level. Economists claim that securities prices are forecasts of future outcomes. Here, we report on a simple experiment in which participants were rewarded to make the most accurate possible forecast of a canonical financial time series. We discovered excessive volatility in individual-level forecasts, paralleling the fin..