DotCom Mania: The Rise and Fall of Internet Stock Prices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides one potential explanation for the rise, persistence and eventual fall of internet stock prices. Specifically, we appeal to a model of heterogenous agents with varying degrees of beliefs about asset payoffs who are subject to short sales constraints. In this framework, it is possible that "optimistic" investors overwhelm "pessimistic" ones, leading to prices not reflecting fundamental values about cash flows summarized by aggregate beliefs. Empirical support for this explanation is provided by exploring the behavior of internet stock prices during the period January 1998 to November 2000. In particular, we document four important elements to our story: (i) the high level of internet stock prices given their underlying fundamentals, (ii) responses of stock prices to a shift towards potentially optimistic investors, (iii) empirical results consistent with shorting being at its maximum possible level for internet stocks, and (iv) the eventual fall, or bubble bursting, of internet stocks being tied to the increase in the number of sellers to the market via expiration of lockup agreements.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".