Impact of information cost and switching of trading strategies in an artificial stock market

• We designed a new type of agent-based model with pay-for-switch behavior.
• Switchers decide whether to pay for information to become informed before trading.
• The larger the percentage of switchers, the larger the volatility.
• But, when switchers paying for information increases, the effect becomes opposite.
• Pay-for-switch promotes the diffusion of information and stabilizes the market.

This paper studies the switching of trading strategies and its effect on the market volatility in a continuous double auction market. We describe the behavior when some uninformed agents, who we call switchers, decide whether or not to pay for information before they trade. By paying for the information they behave as informed traders. First we verify that our model is able to reproduce some of the stylized facts in real financial markets. Next we consider the relationship between switching and the market volatility under different structures of investors. We find that there exists a positive relationship between the market volatility and the percentage of switchers. We therefore conclude that the switchers are a destabilizing factor in the market. However, for a given fixed percentage of switchers, the proportion of switchers that decide to buy information at a given moment of time is negatively related to the current market volatility. In other words, if more agents pay for information to know the fundamental value at some time, the market volatility will be lower. This is because the market price is closer to the fundamental value due to information diffusion between switchers.