Wisdom of the Crowd in Experiments

Larissa Katharina Senninger analyses the phenomenon of wisdom of the crowd in experimental capital markets. Aiming to find out which market mechanism is able to aggregate different information in a meaningful way, a continuous double auction and a call auction mechanism are tested. In line with expectations, markets with continuous double auction mechanism are better able to aggregate information and additionally take a shorter time. The author shows that receiving more information enables subjects to make better estimations, whereas more information improves the quality of estimations significantly only if it is a lot more information.