Emergence of Cooperative Long-term Market Loyalty in Double Auction Markets

TL;DR

This paper models double auction markets with adaptive traders to investigate how spontaneous long-term loyalty emerges through repeated interactions, leading to market segregation and increased rewards.

Contribution

It introduces a stylized adaptive trader model showing how spontaneous loyalty and market segregation can arise from agent interactions in double auction markets.

Findings

Loyalty emerges when market return scales surpass a threshold.

Market segregation stabilizes through cooperative behavior among agents.

Segregated markets yield higher rewards for traders and the overall system.

Abstract

Loyal buyer-seller relationships can arise by design, e.g. when a seller tailors a product to a specific market niche to accomplish the best possible returns, and buyers respond to the dedicated efforts the seller makes to meet their needs. We ask whether it is possible, instead, for loyalty to arise spontaneously, and in particular as a consequence of repeated interaction and co-adaptation among the agents in a market. We devise a stylized model of double auction markets and adaptive traders that incorporates these features. Traders choose where to trade (which market) and how to trade (to buy or to sell) based on their previous experience. We find that when the typical scale of market returns (or, at fixed scale of returns, the intensity of choice) become higher than some threshold, the preferred state of the system is segregated: both buyers and sellers are segmented into subgroups that are persistently loyal to one market over another. We characterize the segregated state analytically in the limit of large markets: it is stabilized by some agents acting cooperatively to enable trade, and provides higher rewards than its unsegregated counterpart both for individual traders and the population as a whole.