Herd Behaviors in Financial Markets

Kyungsik Kim, Seong-Min Yoon, J. S. Choi, Hideki Takayasu

Published 2004-05-09Version 1

We investigate the herd behavior of returns for the yen-dollar exchange rate in the Japanese financial market. It is obtained that the probability distribution $P(R)$ of returns $R$ satisfies the power-law behavior $P(R) \simeq R^{-\beta}$ with the exponents $ \beta=3.11$(the time interval $\tau=$ one minute) and 3.36($\tau=$ one day). The informational cascade regime appears in the herding parameter $H\ge 2.33$ at $\tau=$ one minute, while it occurs no herding at $\tau=$ one day. Especially, we find that the distribution of normalized returns shows a crossover to a Gaussian distribution at one time step $\Delta t=1$ day.