Stock market herd behavioral mechanism and its impact based on computational experiment

This paper studies herd behavior by designing an artificial stock market model and analyzing its results in which way the true herd behavior and the spurious herd behavior can be differentiated.The result shows that,in the short run,herding interacts with the returns and destabilizing the market.In the long run,it is not the traders' herd behavior but the traders' disregard of discovering their own information, the low proportion of informed traders and the lack of market liquidity that are to blame for the anomalies in stock markets.Herding is only an intervening variable.Besides,this paper also finds out that,due to immaturity,there is more herd behavior in the Chinese stock markets than in the foreign mature markets and thus its returns are more volatile and the stocks' prices are more likely to deviate from their true values significantly.