The market selection depends on agent's survival index, which is a function of agent's belief and risk preference. When preferences are identical, the survival index of an agent is a decreasing function of his belief accuracy and therefore agent survives if and only if he has the lowest survival...

We propose a new welfare criterion that allows us to rank alternative financial market structures in the presence of belief heterogeneity. We analyze economies with complete and incomplete financial markets and/or restricted trading possibilities in the form of borrowing limits or transaction...

Traditional finance is built on the rationality paradigm. This chapter discusses simple models from an alternative approach in which financial markets are viewed as complex evolutionary systems. Agents are boundedly rational and base their investment decisions upon market forecasting heuristics....

This paper develops a theory of endogenously (non-)Ricardian beliefs. That is, whether Ricardian Equivalence holds in an equilibrium depends on endogenous private sector beliefs. The novelty here is a restricted perceptions viewpoint: in complex forecasting environments, agents forecast...

We study the effects of market incompleteness on speculation, investor survival, and asset pricing moments, when investors disagree about the likelihood of jumps and have recursive preferences. We consider two models. In a model with jumps in aggregate consumption, incompleteness barely matters,...

The wisdom of the crowd applied to financial markets asserts that prices represent a consensus belief that is more accurate than individual beliefs. However, a market selection argument implies that prices eventually reflect only the beliefs of the most accurate agent. In this paper, we show how...

We study the effects of diverse beliefs on equilibrium securitization under risk neutrality. We provide a simple characterization of the optimal securities. Pooling and tranching of assets emerges in equilibrium as a consequence of the traders' diverse beliefs about asset returns. The issuer of...

We analyze how a benevolent, privately-informed government agency would optimally release information about the economy's growth rate when the agents hold heterogeneous beliefs. We model two types of agents: "trusting" and "distrustful." The former has a prior that is identical to that of the...

This paper intends to contribute to the theoretical literature on the determinants of exchange rate fluctuations. We build an agent-based model, based on behavioral assumptions inspired by the literature on behavioral finance and by empirical surveys about the behavior of foreign exchange...

We relax the common assumption of homogeneous beliefs in principal-agent relationships with adverse selection. Principals are competitors in the product market and write contracts also on the base of an expected aggregate. The model is a version of a cobweb model. In an evolutionary learning...