When studying consumption choices, economists have often relied on the abstraction of a representative agent. Such an agent can indeed be shown to exist and to replicate the aggregate consumers' demand under standard, but not necessarily convincing assumptions (Kirman (1992)). There was also...

This article studies belief heterogeneity in a benchmark competitive asset market: a market for Arrow–Debreu securities. We show that differences in agents' beliefs lead to a systematic pricing pattern, the favourite–longshot bias (FLB): securities with a low-pay-out probability are...