The impact of an insider and short-selling on bubble formation in experimental financial market
Abstract This study extends the institutional design of the existing literature focusing solely on short selling by introducing an insider who is informed of the dividend distribution and experienced outsiders who gain information via trading experience. Our findings show that introducing short selling and an insider does reduce the bubble duration and size. At the same time, volatility is significantly reduced. Furthermore, the presence of the single insider reduces the large undervaluation and overall turnover in pure short selling treatment and generates small positive bubbles. Once the outsiders gain information via trading experience, there are small positive bubbles with reduced volatility.
Since international awareness of a global rush for land has grown from 2008 onward, various databases and reports have attempted to provide an overview of the situation by compiling information on individual land deals. While providing such an overview is challenging owing to the dynamic and untransparent nature of the investments, flawed methods of using and citing data are aggravating that challenge and allowing dissemination of inaccurate information. The consequences are an unnecessarily blurred picture of the land deal situation and thus an inadequate basis for related political decisions or social actions and a misleading starting point for new research projects. In this article we demonstrate some of the flaws in the use of data and their consequences, with examples from fieldwork and literature on Tanzania. The paper illustrates and contributes to the evolving debate on appropriate research methodologies for studying the global land rush.