Information Trading in Terms of Brokers' Functional Cognition: an Exploratory Single Participant Experimentation

Abstract

Information trading (henceforth IT) is a criminal offense in the vicinity of mega stock markets. It gives an unfair and illegal advantage to the buyer of related information. The national and global damage caused by this sort of delinquency is immense, in a yearly scale of trillions. On top of the applied importance of such offenses, they pose a meaningful theoretical and empirical challenge. The present proposal offers an attempt to exemplify the viability of the Functional Theory of Cognition and the methodological counterpart of the theory, Functional Measurement, as a means to establish a basis for related profiling attempts in terms of the functional way IT is coded in the beholders’ (i.e., senior brokers) cognitive system. An exemplary single-participant functional measurement is presented along with a demo empirical illustration of the way the distinction between Type A and Type B brokers can contribute to due profiling. Possible future related scientific ventures are pointed at briefly.