Chatter #208 – Julian Winkler: How Ideas Spread On Reddit And Wall Street Bets

Julian Winkler is the co-author of the paper “Reddit’s self-organised bull runs: Social contagion and asset prices” about the subreddit Wall Street Bets. The paper makes a “theoretical case for how ‘hype’ among retail investors can drive large asset fluctuations”. The paper was written before the GameStop Saga kicked off, but the interesting part about this for me was to get an understanding of how he believes ideas spread online. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the process of writing my book on GameStop and it was fascinating for me to talk to someone who was approaching this from an academic approach, not a meme-driven one. This interview was also filmed as part of the documentary I took part in last month, so that’s why there are some cuts and guys filming in the background!

Julian is a DPhil student in Economics at the University of Oxford, supervised by Doyne Farmer, Rick Van der Ploeg and Steve Bond, and is part of the Complexity Economics group at the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

Julian was previously a Research Assistant for the Programme on Technological and Economic Change at the Oxford Martin School. His research focused on heavy-tailed phenomena in economic data, investigating their origins, and their implications for policy. He received his MSc in Economics at the University of Warwick in January 2017 and joined Oxford Martin School in September 2017.

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Resources

https://www.julianwinkler.info
https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/people/julian-winkler/

https://www.julianwinkler.info/research/wsb.pdf