Over-the-counter Markets Research Articles

Trading Financial Derivatives on the Web—An Approach Towards Automating Negotiations on OTC Markets

Derivative instruments have become increasingly important to financial institutions, institutional investors, traders and private individuals throughout the world, both as risk-management tools and as a source of revenue. The volume of over-the-counter (OTC) traded derivatives has increased enormously over the past decade, because institutional investors have often had a need for special derivative products which are not traded on organized exchanges. An important feature of OTC trading is the bargaining on multiple attributes of a contract such as price, strike price and contract maturity. Negotiation on multiple attributes of a deal is currently not supported by electronic trading floors. In this paper we describe an approach of how to automate the multi-attribute multilateral negotiations using a Web-based trading system. First, we will give an overview of various approaches to supporting or automating negotiations on multiple attributes. Then we will introduce multi-attribute auctions, an extension of single-sided auction theory and analyze preliminary game-theoretic results. Finally, we will show a Web-based electronic trading system for OTC derivatives, based on multi-attribute auctions.