Are stockholders rational? An experimental approach to testing the competitive storage model

The competitive storage model has been the main workhorse of the analysis of the role of storage in commodity price formation since Gustafson proposed his model in 1958. The main approach to testing the competitive storage model has been the comparison of the characteristics of the predicted prices series with actual commodity price series. This paper introduces a new approach to testing the competitive storage model. A relatively simple model is taken to the experimental laboratory. Participants in the experiment are asked make storage decisions within a competitive storage model framework. Their behaviour and the resulting price series are compared to the model assumptions and predictions. The experiment will be run at the University of Trento in April 2014.