Browsing by Subject "Timing"
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Item Information Acquisition and Revelation in the Financial Markets(2018-06) Chu, YinxiaoInformation plays an important role in financial markets. In this dissertation, first, we consider how traders choose different information. Second, we ask when traders acquire information under competition. Finally, we analyze how ambiguous information affects traders' incentives to trade and reveal their private information. There is information not only about the payoff but also concerning the supply and demand of an asset. In Chapter 1, we study how traders choose to process different information while asset prices are conveying some information. We show that traders decide to process different types of information depends on their initial belief and the informativeness of asset prices. In particular, when the return to each type of information is increasing, traders choose to learn only one type of information. Those who have more precise initial belief about the asset payoff (supply) choose to learn more about the asset payoff (supply). In Chapter 2, we study when traders decide to acquire information under competition. Traders consider two effects of competition in information acquisition: one is that an informed trader's profitability is affected by the presence of another informed trader, the other is the spillover of the information from the informed trader to the uninformed. We show that, when the former effect dominates, then traders tend to acquire information earlier. If the otherwise, then traders tend to delay their information acquisition. In Chapter 3, we study traders' behavior when information is ambiguous, which gives rise to multiple probability models to describe uncertainty. We demonstrate that ambiguity will reduce traders' incentive to trade and reveal their private information. When there is a moderate level of ambiguity, informed traders start to trade randomly, whereas they trade for sure when there is no or a little uncertainty. When ambiguity is sufficiently large, informed traders choose not to trade any more, and no additional information will be revealed in the market.Item Lateral intraparietal area activity as a temporal production signal during precise timing.(2011-08) Schneider, Blaine AndrewWe often perform movements without external cues telling us when to move. However, the way our brains time self-initiated movements is still unclear. For example, while temporal modulations in neuronal activity have been observed in a variety of timing tasks, it is not clear if these modulations are strictly related to the timing of movements or instead reflect timing measurements of external events such as sensory cues and rewards. To isolate the temporal production signals of movement initiation, we devised a self-timed task that requires non-human primates to saccade between two fixed targets at regular intervals in the absence of external cueing and without an immediate expectation of reward. To examine the potential neural basis of this temporally dependent behavior, we recorded from single neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), which has been implicated in the cognitive planning and execution of eye movements. In contrast to previous studies that observed a build-up of activity associated with the passage of time, we found that LIP activity decreased at a constant rate over the inter-saccadic interval. Moreover, this falling activity was found to be significantly predictive of inter-saccadic interval duration on an interval by interval basis. Interestingly, the relationship of this falling activity to the actual duration of the timed interval depended on eye movement direction: it was negatively correlated when the upcoming saccade was toward the neuron's response field, and positively correlated when the upcoming saccade was directed away from the response field. This suggests that LIP activity encodes timed movements in a push-pull manner by signaling for both saccade initiation towards one target and prolonged fixation for the other target. Thus timed movements in this task appear to reflect the competition between local populations of task relevant neurons, rather than a global timing signal. Additionally, microstimulation was delivered during separate experiments to determine if a causal relationship existed between LIP activity and motor production. Stimulation affected the animals perception of time in a manner consistent with the correlation results, suggesting that LIP activity provides a motor timing signal that is utilized in the initiation of precisely timed behaviors.