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by tloinuy
1590 days ago
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Agree with the combinations being more ephemeral outside of futures and options markets. I do wonder how much liquidity will exist for these combos, since even some of the popular structural ones don't have a ton of volume. Regarding the last point, let's say hypothetically you create a market for "+100 FB shares, -500 SNAP shares". If everyone is competing on price to quote that combination, that creates the most competitive market. However, if there are many expressive bids with various conditions (e.g. minimum quantities, conditional on execution of another leg, etc), they may not get "implied" into creating a reasonable market, creating exponentially more arbitrage opportunities if they become locked/crossed. This adds a lot more complexity in calculating implied markets and matching them in a sensible way. With price-time priority, I agree that there are downsides as you mentioned, but it makes it easier to ensure the tightest spreads. |
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Some combinatorial auctions make this tradeoff, packaging goods either to deal with computational limitations or to concentrate bidding on a few packages. It can work if there's near total consensus on what the economically relevant packages are, but it doesn't work otherwise. US equities is an "otherwise" case given a huge diversity of needs. The chance of someone wanting the opposite side of even a pairs trade at any given point in time is vanishingly rare. It's far more likely that the person doing the pair would interact with two or more counterparties independently actively interested in or willing to for the right price sell FB and buy SNAP (perhaps conditional on hedging). The mechanism design game is more about giving every party the tools they need to communicate their value function to the auctioneer and creating the incentives to bid (close to) truthfully.
> However, if there are many expressive bids with various conditions (e.g. minimum quantities, conditional on execution of another leg, etc), they may not get "implied" into creating a reasonable market, creating exponentially more arbitrage opportunities if they become locked/crossed.
And this is why combinatorial auctions are a global optimization (as opposed to implied, which are effectively an iterative and greedy approximation) and, in our case, one that seeks to find uniform clearing prices. There are formats with price discrimination and others in which mechanical arbitrage within an auction is possible, but ours is not one of them. There isn't a separate price for {A}, {B}, and {A, B} — within each auction there's a uniform price for p_a and p_b, and p_{a,b} = p_a + p_b (and so on for any arbitrary linear combination). Theoretical point: linear prices don't always exist (in practice, they do for interdependent value goods that aren't strongly sub or superadditive, e.g., capital market goods), and they're not inherently desirable. We chose linear pricing largely because it's a natural fit for how capital markets work now, and perceived fairness/simplicity is itself a valid mechanism design consideration.