Artificial Software Agents on Thin Markets: A
Human Trader Experiment
This paper studies how software agents influence the market
behavior of human traders. Programmed traders with a passive arbitrage seeking
strategy are introduced in a double auction market experiment with human
subjects in the laboratory. As a treatment variable, the influence of information
on the existence of software agents is investigated. We found that common
knowledge about the presence of software agents triggers more efficient market
prices in the presence of the programmed strategy whereas an effect of the
information condition on behavioral variables could not be observed. Surprisingly,
the introduction of software agents results in lower market efficiency in
the no information treatment when compared to the baseline treatment without
software agents.