Modern financial markets offer the real world's best approximation to the idealized price auction market envisioned in economic theory. Nevertheless, as the increasingly exquisite and detailed financial data demonstrate, financial markets often fail to behave as they should if trading were truly...

The fact that human economic behaviour has a significant irrational element - one that is simultaneously hard-to-explain and highly predictable - has fascinated economists for decades from Fechner, 1860 to Shiller, 2005 and beyond. In this dissertation, I investigate the field from various...