We study a general static noisy rational expectations model, where investors have private information about asset payo¤s, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of...

The paper analyses the effects of strategic behaviour by an insider in a price discovery process, akin to an information tâtonnement, in the presence of a competitive informed sector. Such processes are used in the pre-opening period of continuous trading systems in several exchanges. It is...

We present a decision theoretic framework with agents that are learning about the behavior of market determined variables. Agents are 'internally rational', i.e., maximize discounted expected utility under uncertainty given consistent beliefs about the future, but may not be 'externally...

With only minimal restrictions on security payoffs and trader preferences, noisy aggregation of heterogeneous information drives a systematic wedge between the impact of fundamentals on the price of a security, and the corresponding impact on cash flow expectations. From an ex ante perspective,...

Survey respondents strongly disagree about return risks and, increasingly, macroeconomic uncertainty. This may have contributed to higher asset prices through increased use of collateralisation, which allows risk-neutral investors to realise perceived gains from trade. Investors with lower risk...

Directed search models are market games in which each firm announces a wage commitment to attract a worker. Miscoordination among workers generates search frictions, yet in equilibrium more productive firms post more attractive wage commitments to fill their vacancies faster, which yields...

We examine strategic information transmission in a controlled laboratory experiment of a cheap talk game with one sender and multiple receivers. We study the change in equilibrium behavior from the addition of another audience as well as from varying the degree of conflict between the sender's...

We consider a frictional two-sided matching market in which one side uses public cheap-talk announcements so as to attract the other side. We show that if the first-price auction is adopted as the trading protocol, then cheap talk can be perfectly informative, and the resulting market outcome is...

In many bilateral transactions, the seller fears being underpaid because its outside option is better known to the buyer. We rationalize a variety of observed contracts as solutions to such smart buyer problems. The key to these solutions is to grant the seller upside participation. In contrast,...

We survey the literature analysing the price formation and trading process, and the consequences of market organization for price discovery and welfare. We develop a united perspective on theoretical, empirical and experimental approaches. We discuss the evidence on transaction costs and the...