Speculative Bubbles and Control Theory—An Endogenous Approach

Speculative bubble formation has been a long observed feature of markets, and continues to be a major focus of behavioral finance, economics, marketing, and operations management research. While these bubbles arise from specific physical or informational features of specific markets, their formation is also driven by the interplay between realized prices and expected rewards, balanced against the increasing risk of loss from speculation. As in macroeconomic stability literature of the prior century, this work applies classical proportional‐integral‐derivative (PID) controller design to a sociotechnical context. However, unlike this prior approach, this work extends this classic model for speculative bubbles by explicitly incorporating feedback between the those making choices and the systems in which they are embedded. Three case studies are presented to illustrate how this parsimonious and context‐agnostic approach can classify and describe both value‐creating and value‐destroying speculation.