Do futures markets have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on commodity prices? Empirical evidence is inconclusive. We try to resolve this question by means of a learning-to-forecast experiment in which a futures market and a spot market are coupled. The spot market exhibits negative feedback...

We derive new bounds on the rational variation in asset prices over time. The resulting test requires no proxy for fundamental value, and it allows significantly more flexibility in preferences and discount rates than in standard volatility tests. We gain traction by focusing specifically on...

Do futures markets have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on commodity prices? Empirical evidence is inconclusive. We try to resolve this question by means of a learning-to-forecast experiment in which a futures market and a spot market are coupled. The spot market exhibits negative feedback...

We argue that perception, priming, and cognition research utilize the tools of stage magic in problematic ways, engaging in what we call "surprise-hacking." Surprise-hacking consists of the pre-experimental planning and staging of counterintuitive and negative results (such as blindness, bias,...

Using recent findings from brain sciences, we model the human brain as solving two optimization problems instead of one, which are (i) optimal resource allocation in the brain and (ii) mean-variance optimization. This changes the classical CAPM in only one way: an alpha appears which provides a...

Using case studies of two investment companies, this paper highlights that organizations may have “investment tribes,” i.e., groups of individuals who appear to exhibit similar risk tendencies for gambles involving gains or losses, possibly with a wide spread of risk preferences. Tribes and...

When an agent receives information from a source whose accuracy might be either high or low, standard theory dictates that she update as if the source has medium accuracy. In a lab experiment, subjects deviate from this benchmark by reacting less to uncertain sources, especially when the sources...

Seeing — perception and vision — is implicitly the fundamental building block of the literature on rationality and cognition. Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman's arguments against the omniscience of economic agents — and the concept of bounded rationality — depend critically on a...

In this paper we propose a multi-objective decision framework for lifecycle investment choice. Instead of optimizing individual strategies with respect to a single-valued objective, we suggest evaluation of classes of strategies in terms of the quality of the tradeoffs that they provide. The...

Economists, observers and policy-makers often emphasize the role of sentiment as a potential driver of the business cycle. In this paper we provide three contributions to this debate. First, we critically survey the existing literature on sentiment (considering both confidence and uncertainty)...