Asset Auctions, Information, and Liquidity

A model is presented of a uniform price auction where bidders compete in demand schedules; the model allows for common and private values in the absence of exogenous noise. It is shown how private information yields more market power than the levels seen with full information. Results obtained here are broadly consistent with evidence from asset auctions, may help explain the response of central banks to the crisis, and suggest potential improvements in the auction formats of asset auctions.adverse selection, market power, reverse auctions, bid shading

Competition and Stability in Banking

I review the state of the art of the academic theoretical and empirical literature on the potential trade-off between competition and stability in banking. There are two basic channels through which competition may increase instability: by exacerbating the coordination problem of depositors/investors on the liability side and fostering runs/panics, and by increasing incentives to take risk and raise failure probabilities. The competition-stability trade-off is characterized and the implications of the analysis for regulation and competition policy are derived. It is found that optimal regulation may depend on the intensity of competition.antitrust, regulation, crisis, risk-taking, mergers, state aid, bail-outs

Endogenous Public Information and Welfare

This paper performs a welfare analysis of economies with private information when public information is endogenously generated and agents can condition on noisy public statistics in the rational expectations tradition. Equilibrium is not (restricted) efficient even when feasible allocations share similar properties to the market context (e.g., linear in information). The reason is that the market in general does not internalize the informational externality when public statistics (e.g., prices) convey information and does not balance optimally non-fundamental volatility and the dispersion of actions. Under strategic substitutability, equilibrium prices will tend to convey too little information when the “informational” role of prices prevails over its “index of scarcity” role and too much information in the opposite case. Under strategic complementarity, prices always convey too little information. The welfare loss at the market solution may be increasing in the precision of private information. These results extend to the internal efficiency benchmark (accounting only for the collective welfare of the active players). Received results—on the relative weights placed by agents on private and public information, when the latter is exogenous—may be overturned.information externality, strategic complementarity and substitutability, asymmetric information, excess volatility, team solution, rational expectations, behavioral traders

Games of strategic complementarities: An application to bayesian games

Games of strategic complementarities are those in which any player increases his action in response to an increase in the level of actions of rivals. This paper provides an introduction to the theory of games of strategic complementarities, considers Bayesian games, and provides an application to global games.Strategic complementarities; games theory;

Dynamic Trading and Asset Prices: Keynes vs. Hayek

We investigate the dynamics of prices, information and expectations in a competitive, noisy, dynamic asset pricing equilibrium model with long-term investors. We argue that the fact that prices can score worse or better than consensus opinion in predicting the fundamentals is a product of endogenous short-term speculation. For a given, positive level of residual payoff uncertainty, if noise trade displays low persistence rational investors act like market makers, accommodate the order flow, and prices are farther away from fundamentals compared to consensus. This defines a “Keynesian” region; the complementary region is “Hayekian” in that rational investors chase the trend and prices are systematically closer to fundamentals than average expectations. The standard case of no residual uncertainty and noise trading following a random walk is on the frontier of the two regions and identifies the set of deep parameters for which rational investors abide by Keynes’ dictum of concentrating on an asset “long term prospects and those only.” The analysis explains how accommodation and trend chasing strategies differ from momentum and reversal phenomena because of the different information sets that investors and an outside observer have.efficient market hypothesis, long and short-term trading, average expectations, higher order beliefs, over-reliance on public information, opaqueness, momentum, reversal

Dynamic Trading and Asset Prices: Keynes vs. Hayek

We investigate the dynamics of prices, information and expectations in a competitive, noisy, dynamic asset pricing equilibrium model. We look at the bias of prices as estimators of fundamental value in relation to traders' average expectations and note that prices are more (less) biased than average expectations if and only if traders over- (under-) rely on public information with respect to optimal statistical weights. We find that prices are biased in relation to average expectations whenever traders speculate on short-run price move- ments. In a market with long term traders, over-reliance on public information obtains if noise trade increments are correlated enough and/or there is low enough residual uncertainty in the payoff. This defines a “Keynesian” region; the complementary region is “Hayekian” in that prices are less biased than average expectations in the estimation of fundamental value. The standard case of no residual uncertainty and noise trading following a random walk is on the frontier of the two regions. With short-term traders there typically are two equilibria, with the stable (unstable) one displaying over- (under-) reliance on public information.Price bias, long and short-term trading, multiple equilibria, average expectations, higher order beliefs, over-reliance on public information.

Expectations, Liquidity, and Short-term Trading

We consider a two-period market with persistent liquidity trading and risk averse privately informed investors who have a one period horizon. With persistence, prices reflect average expectations about fundamentals and liquidity trading. Informed investors engage in “retrospective” learning to reassess the inference about fundamentals made at the early stage of the trading game. This introduces strategic complementarities in the use of information and can yield two stable equilibria which can be ranked in terms of liquidity, volatility, and informational efficiency. We establish the limits of the beauty contest analogy for financial markets and derive a rich set of implications to explain market anomalies, and empirical regularities.price speculation, multiple equilibria, average expectations, public information, momentum and reversal, Beauty Contest

Public and Private Learning from Prices, Strategic Substitutability and Complementarity, and Equilibrium Multiplicity

We study a general static noisy rational expectations model, where investors have private information about asset payoffs, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of equilibria. We find that a main driver of the characterization of equilibria is whether the actions of investors are strategic substitutes or complements. This latter property in turn is driven by the strength of a private learning channel from prices, arising from the multidimensional sources of asymmetric information, in relation to the usual public learning channel. When the private learning channel is strong (weak) in relation to the public we have strong (weak) strategic complementarity in actions and potentially multiple (unique) equilibria. The results enable a precise characterization of whether information acquisition decisions are strategic substitutes or complements. We find that the strategic substitutability in information acquisition result obtained in Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) is robust.rational expectations equilibrium, strategic complementarity, multiplicity of equilibria, asymmetric information, risk exposure, bedging, supply information

Higher Order Expectations, Illiquidity, and Short-term Trading

We propose a theory that jointly accounts for an asset illiquidity and for the asset price potential over-reliance on public information. We argue that, when trading frequencies differ across traders, asset prices reflect investors' Higher Order Expectations (HOEs) about the two factors that influence the aggregate demand: fundamentals information and liquidity trades. We show that it is precisely when asset prices are driven by investors' HOEs about fundamentals that they over-rely on public information, the market displays high illiquidity, and low volume of informational trading; conversely, when HOEs about fundamentals are subdued, prices under-rely on public information, the market hovers in a high liquidity state, and the volume of informational trading is high. Over-reliance on public information results from investors' under-reaction to their private signals which, in turn, dampens uncertainty reduction over liquidation prices, favoring an increase in price risk and illiquidity. Therefore, a highly illiquid market implies higher expected returns from contrarian strategies. Equivalently, illiquidity arises as a byproduct of the lack of participation of informed investors in their capacity of liquidity suppliers, a feature that appears to capture some aspects of the recent crisis.Expected returns, multiple equilibria, average expectations, over-reliance on public information, Beauty Contest.

Competitive Rational Expectations Equilibria without Apology

In a standard financial market model with asymmetric information with a finite number N of risk-averse informed traders, competitive rational expectations equilibria provide a good approximation to strategic equilibria as long as N is not too small: equilibrium prices in eachsituation converge to each other at a rate of 1/N as the market becomes large. Theapproximation is particularly good when the informationally adjusted risk bearing capacity of traders is not very large. This is not the case if informed traders are close to risk neutral. Both equilibria converge to the competitive equilibrium of an idealized limit continuum economy as the market becomes large at a slower rate of 1/ãN and, therefore, the limit equilibrium need not be a good approximation of the strategic equilibrium in moderately large markets.gschizophreniah problem, strategic equilibrium, large markets, information acquisition, free entry, rate of convergence