The current financial crisis is a crisis of theory as well. The dominant theory of financial markets, the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), states that in an efficient market the price of a financial asset reflects publicly available information about that asset. Competing theories, such as...

We study decisions to sell nonexcludable private information in the presence of a trading opportunity. Sell-side agents heighten competition among agents who buy their signals to combine with their own for proprietary trading purposes and thereby promote financial market efficiency. This result...

In this paper, we develop a model in which overconfident market participants and rational speculators trade against trend-chasers. We show that the growth and the burst of a financial bubble stem from positive feedback trading. However, the presence of overconfident traders and the risk aversion...

In the following paper we analyze the strategic competition between fast and slow traders. The model of Kyle (1985) is adapted to analyze the effect of speed in such a model. A High Frequency Trader (HFT) is defined as a trader that has the ability to react to information faster than other...

We document that analysts cater to short-term investors by issuing optimistic target prices. Catering dominates among analysts at brokers without an investment banking arm as they face lower reputational cost. The market does not see through the analyst catering activity and their forecasts lead...

We analyze an entrepreneur's choice between angel and venture capital (VC) financing in a competitive investment market, where the entrepreneur seeks to maintain his ownership share as well as equity value. The key to our analysis is the idea that a negative signal is inferred by the market if...

Recent empirical studies suggest that, during times of unexpected innovation, agents heterogeneously update their beliefs about an asset fundamental value, and they are uncertain about other agents' beliefs on it. In this paper I show that, when there is uncertainty about the market sentiment,...

This paper studies how investors react to public messages that may be optimistically biased. We first construct a communication game between an investor and a (possibly) biased securities analyst. We find an equilibrium characterised by the following properties: first, the investor reacts more...

In this paper, we analyze the conflicts of interest of an informed agent who is responsible for divulging his private information about a company and has a reward function positively dependent on its stock price. We assume that the demand for the stock is subject to shocks that may increase...