摘要
This paper explores some behavioral factors that may explain the formation of speculative bubbles in financial markets. The study adopts an experimental approach focused on the agents’ behavior when facing a “true” bubble and is incentivized to herd and/or receive information about the market sentiment. For this purpose, a straightforward laboratory experiment that reproduces the dotcom market bubble and asks subjects to forecast asset prices in a true dynamic information scenario. The experiment was conducted in the laboratory of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Salamanca and involved 137 undergraduate students in the degree of economics. The results show that incentives to the herding behavior increase the forecasted volatility and thus contribute to the bubble inflation. Nevertheless, this effect may be offset by giving information to the agents about the expected market trend. Therefore, under herding effects, it is the absence of clear signals about market sentiments what inflates the bubble.
