Close Communications: Hedge Funds, Brokers and the Emergence of Herding
研究竞争性市场参与者之间的沟通、评估和决策实践如何促成羊群行为，并探讨其对价格和风险等市场整体现象的影响。基于对欧美亚对冲基金从业者的访谈和观察，发现决策依赖双层连接结构，导致基于专业知识的羊群行为和过度嵌入风险。
We examine how communication, evaluation and decision‐making practices among competing market actors contribute to the establishment of herding and whether this has impact on market‐wide phenomena such as prices and risk. Data are collected from interviews and observations with hedge fund industry participants in Europe, the USA and Asia. We examine both contemporaneous and biographical data, finding that decision‐making relies on an elaborate two‐tiered structure of connections among hedge fund managers and between them and brokers. This structure is underpinned by idea sharing and development between competing hedge funds leading to ‘expertise‐based’ herding and an increased probability of over‐embeddedness. We subsequently present a case study demonstrating the role that communication between competing hedge funds plays in the creation of herding and show that such trades affect prices by introducing an additional risk: the disregarding of information from sources outside the trusted connections.