Blockchain technology ensures that data is tamper-proof, traceable, and trustworthy. This article introduces a wellknown blockchain technology implementation-Hyperledger Fabric. The basic framework and privacy protection mechanisms of Hyperledger Fabric such as certificate authority, channel, Private Data Collection, etc. are described. As an example, a specific business scenario of supply chain finance is figured out. And accordingly, some design details about how to apply these privacy protection mechanisms are described.

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Predicting and analyzing behaviors of investors is of great value to financial institutions. This paper uses survey data from about 9,000 individual investors across China to explore the predictability of decision behaviors by studying demographic characteristics that are relatively easy to obtain. After applying Pearson’s chi-squared test, Spearman rank correlation test, and several data mining methods, we verified that demographic characteristics are closely linked to decision behaviors, and it would be an economical and feasible solution for financial organizations to build initial behavioral prediction models especially when investors’ behavioral data are insufficient.

The value of a company’s cash holdings is currently a hot issue in corporate finance research. Current studies have not reached a unified conclusion. Moreover, no one has ever studied that from the perspective of information asymmetry. However, there still exist disputes about the measurement of the degree of information asymmetry. Previous studies mostly adopt single index to analysis this issue, and the economic meaning it represents only reflects some information of asymmetric information, so it was one-sided and the conclusion also differ. Drawing on the market microstructure and the index of information asymmetry of managers and investors, this paper constructs a new proxy for information asymmetry based on the principal component analysis. We find that a company’s value of cash holdings decreases increasingly with its level of information asymmetry, and the relationship between information asymmetry and the value of cash holdings is nonlinear.

One of the main differences between sentiment and infectious diseases is that the former one has two opposite infectious states: positive (optimistic) and negative (pessimistic), while the latter one has not. In this paper, based on the SISa model, we consider this issue and propose a new model of sentiment contagion called the SOSa-SPSa model. The results of both numerical and agent-based simulations show that our model could explain the process of sentiment contagion better than that of Hill et al. (2010). Further analysis shows that both the numbers of optimistic and pessimistic individuals will increase with the probability of spontaneity or contagion and decrease with the probability of recovery. Potential applications of this model in financial market have also been discussed.