Opinion Dynamics Explain Price Formation in Prediction Markets.

Prediction markets are heralded as powerful forecasting tools, but models that describe them often fail to capture the full complexity of the underlying mechanisms that drive price dynamics. To address this issue, we propose a model in which agents belong to a social network, have an opinion about the probability of a particular event to occur, and bet on the prediction market accordingly. Agents update their opinions about the event by interacting with their neighbours in the network, following the Deffuant model of opinion dynamics.

Estimating the impact of the Internet of Things on productivity in Europe.

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to interconnected devices and objects that collect and transmit data via the Internet. The IoT is an evolving technology, promising to revolutionise industries, but also demanding far-reaching policy changes (e.g.

Stylized facts of intraday precious metals.

This paper examines the stylized facts, correlation and interaction between volatility and returns at the 5-minute frequency for gold, silver, platinum and palladium from May 2000 to April 2015. We study the full sample period, as well as three subsamples to determine how high-frequency data of precious metals have developed over time. We find that over the full sample, the number of trades has increased substantially over time for each precious metal, while the bid-ask spread has narrowed over time, indicating an increase in liquidity and price efficiency.