This paper studies information blockages and the asymmetric release of information in a security market with fixed setup costs of trading. In this setting, 'sidelined' investors may delay trading until price movements validate their private signals. Trading thereby internally generates the...

This paper develops a model of trading in stocks and options based on differences of opinion of public information among risk-averse investors. It shows that both additional trading sessions and the introduction of options enhance investors' perceived welfare and that in the presence of options,...

We analyze competition among informed traders in the continuous-time Kyle (1985) model, as Foster and Viswanathan (1996) do in discrete time. We confirm the conjecture of Holden and Subrahmanyam (1992) that there is no linear equilibrium when traders have identical information. When traders'...

We analyze the effects of differences of opinion on the dynamics of trading volume in stocks and options. We find that disagreements about the mean of the current- and next-period public information lead to trading in stocks in the current period but have no effect on options trading. Without...

We demonstrate that limited participation can arise endogenously in the presence of model uncertainty. Our model generates novel predictions on how limited participation relates to equity premium and diversification discount. When the dispersion in investors' model uncertainty is small, full...

This paper studies information blockages and the asymmetric release of information in a security market with fixed setup costs of trading. In this setting, 'sidelined' investors may delay trading until price movements validate their private signals. Trading thereby internally generates the...

We offer a model to explain why groups of people sometimes converge upon poor decisions and are prone to fads, even though they can discuss the outcomes of their choices. Models of informational herding or cascades have examined how rational individuals learn by observing predecessors' actions,...

We offer a model in which sequences of individuals often converge upon poor decisions and are prone to fads, despite communication of the payoff outcomes from past choices. This reflects both direct and indirect action-based information externalities. In contrast with previous cascades...

Evidence indicates that people fear change and the unknown. We offer a model of familiarity bias in which individuals focus on adverse scenarios in evaluating defections from the status quo. The model explains the endowment effect, portfolio underdiversification, home and local biases....