Hydrodynamic limit of order book dynamics

In this paper, we establish a fluid limit for a two–sided Markov order book model. Our main result states that in a certain asymptotic regime, a pair of measure-valued processes representing the “sell-side shape” and “buy-side shape” of an order book converges to a pair of deterministic measure-valued processes in a certain sense. We also test our fluid approximation on data. The empirical results suggest that the approximation is reasonably good for liquidly–traded stocks in certain time periods.