Meeting Minutes - 14 April, 2008

During this meeting Katalin has summarized a working paper on a taxonomy proposed for artificial stock markets (ASMs). The taxonomy is aimed to give a guideline for analyzing, comparing, replicating and designing ASMs. The main factors proposed are extracted from the market microstructure literature, and representation aspects are added based on the literature on ASMs. Two main groups of factors are distinguished that are used to describe real and artificial stock markets: organizational aspects and behavioral aspects. The first group is related to market organization and it contains static, well-defined aspects, such as: the type of stocks, orders, participants, trading sessions, and exchange mechanism. The second group is related to the hardly observable and varying aspects of markets such as price formation and the behavior of the various market participants. An overview of 15 various ASMs has been given using the taxonomy. The variety of various trading strategies implemented within ASMs has been illustrated. An interesting discussion point is whether and to what degree are the represented traders in these ASMs "agents", and to what degree are they "autonomous".