Limit Order Book (LOB) Shape Modeling in Presence of Heterogeneously Informed Market Participants

Abstract

The modeling of the limit order book is directly related to the assumptions on the behavior of real market participants. This paper is two-fold. We first present empirical findings that lay the ground for two improvements to these models. The first one is concerned with market participants by adding the additional dimension of informed market makers, whereas the second, and maybe more original one, addresses the race in the book between informed traders and informed market makers leading to different shapes of the order book. Namely, we build an agent-based model for the order book with four types of market participants: informed trader, noise trader, informed market makers and noise market makers. We build our model based on the Glosten–Milgrom approach and the most recent Huang–Rosenbaum–Saliba approach. We introduce a parameter capturing the race between informed liquidity traders and suppliers after a new information on the fundamental value of the asset. We then derive the whole “static” limit order book and its characteristics, namely, the bid-ask spread and volumes available at each level price- from the interactions between the agents and compare it with the pre-existing model. We then discuss the case where noise traders have an impact on the fundamental value of the asset and extend the model to take into account many kinds of informed market makers.