Limited liability creates a conflict of interests between policyholders and shareholders of insurance companies. It provides shareholders with incentives to increase the risk of the insurer's assets and liabilities which, in turn, might reduce the value policyholders attach to and premiums they...

Why do investors keep buying underperforming mutual funds? To address this issue, we develop a one-period principal-agent model with a representative investor and a fund manager in an asymmetric information framework. This model shows that the investors perception of the fund plays the key role...

We study the optimal design of a menu of funds by a manager who is required to use linear pricing and does not observe the preferences of investors regarding one of the risky assets. The optimal menu involves bundling of assets and can be explicitly constructed from the solution to a calculus of...

The appendix can be found at: "http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2005194" http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2005194 We consider choice over uncertain, monetary payoffs and study a general class of preferences. These preferences favor diversification, except...

This chapter gives an overview of current research in evolutionary finance. We mainly focus on the survival and stability properties of investment strategies associated with the Kelly rule. Our approach to the study of the wealth dynamics of investment strategies is inspired by Darwinian ideas...

We derive representations for the stock price drift and volatility in the equilibrium of agents with arbitrary, heterogeneous utility functions and with the aggregate dividend following an arbitrary Markov diffusion. We introduce a new, intrinsic characteristic of the aggregate dividend process...

This chapter surveys theoretical research on the long-term performance of fixed-mix investment strategies. These self-financing strategies rebalance the portfolio over time so as to keep constant the proportions of wealth invested in various assets. The main result is that wealth can be grown...

This paper presents an equilibrium model in a pure exchange economy when investors have three possible sources of heterogeneity. Investors may differ in their beliefs, in their level of risk aversion and in their time preference rate. We study the impact of investors heterogeneity on the...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study whether people intuitively use real-option strategies in a dynamic investment setting. The participants were asked to play as an oil manager and make production decisions in response to a simulated mean-reverting oil price. Using cluster analysis,...