What is a speculative bubble?

Abstract

According to complexity economics, a speculative bubble is a paradigmatic case of emergence which forms from individual behaviour. In order to provide a more detailed ontological investigation of this ‘lower level’, this paper aims to understand what a transaction is and how people actualize their financial choices. Given that selling and buying operations may involve just machines, it is argued that collective intentionality, at least in John Searle’s version, is not successful. It would seem, therefore, that the pivotal role is played by documents. The paper focuses mostly on the documents’ capacity to anchor quasi-abstract entities to reality and to attribute social and economic properties, such as property having a certain value. The latter is clearly involved in the emergence of a bubble.