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 examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

We test whether asymmetric preferences for losses versus gains as in Ang, Chen, and Xing (2006) also affect the pricing of cash flow versus discount rate news as in Campbell and Vuolteenaho (2004). We construct a new four-fold beta decomposition, distinguishing cash flow and discount rate betas...

Notwithstanding the recognized importance of traders' expectations in characterizing the observed market dynamics, for instance the formation of speculative bubbles and crashes on financial markets, little attention has been devoted so far by economists to a rigorous study of expectation...

We consider a simple pure exchange economy with two assets, one riskless, yielding a constant return on investment, and one risky, paying a stochastic dividend. Trading takes place in discrete time and in each trading period the price of the risky asset is fixed by imposing market clearing...

We present results of an experiment on expectation formation in an asset market. Participants to our experiment must provide forecasts of the stock future return to computerized utility-maximizing investors, and are rewarded according to how well their forecasts perform in the market. In the...

We provide simple examples to illustrate how wealth-driven selection works in asset markets. Our examples deliver both good and bad news. The good news is that if individual assets demands are expressed as a fractions of wealth to be invested in each asset, e.g. because traders maximize an...

In this paper we study the dynamics of a simple asset pricing model describing the trading activity of heterogeneous agents in a stylized market. The economy in the model contains two assets: a bond with risk-less return and a dividend paying stock. The price of the stock is determined through...

In a complete market for short-lived assets, we investigate long run wealth-driven selection on a general class of investment rules that depend on endogenously determined current and past prices. We find that market instability, leading to asset mis-pricing and informational efficiencies, is a...

In this paper, I investigate the scope of a model with exogenous habit formation - or 'catching up with the Joneses', see Abel (1990) - to generate the observed equity premium as well as other key macroeconomic facts. Along the way, I derive restrictions for four out of eight parameters for a...