Disagreement in a Multi-Asset Market

This paper provides a simple framework to study the effect of disagreement in a multi-asset market equilibrium by considering two agents who disagree about expected returns, variances, and correlation of returns of two risky assets. When agents' subjective beliefs are characterized by mean preserving spreads of a benchmark homogeneous belief, we show that the effect of the disagreement does not cancel out in general and the effect in a multi-asset market can be very different from a single asset market. In particular, the market risk premium can increase and the risk-free rate can decrease significantly even when the market is overoptimistic and overconfident. © International Review of Finance Ltd. 2012

Heterogeneous beliefs and adaptive behaviour in a continuous-time asset price model

This paper extends the analysis of the seminal work of . Brock and Hommes (1997, 1998) on heterogeneous beliefs and rational routes to randomness in discrete-time models to a continuous-time model of asset pricing. The resulting model characterised mathematically by a system of stochastic delay differential equations provides a unified approach to deal with adaptive behaviour of heterogeneous agents and market stability impact of lagged price used by chartists to form their expectations. For the underlying deterministic model, we show not only that the result of Brock and Hommes on rational routes to market instability in discrete-time holds in continuous-time but also a double edged effect of an increase in lagged price used by the chartists on market stability. For the stochastic model, we demonstrate that the interaction and boundedly rational behaviour of heterogeneous agents can generate various market phenomena such as bubbles and crashes and replicate stylised facts including volatility clustering, and long range dependence in volatility. © 2012 Elsevier B.V

Boundedly rational equilibrium and risk premium

When people agree to disagree, the impact of the disagreement among agents on the market is the main concern of this paper. With the standard mean variance framework, this paper considers a market of two risky assets and two agents who have different preference and disagreement about the mean and variance/covariance of the asset returns. By constructing a consensus belief, the paper develops an concept of boundedly rational equilibrium (BRE) to characterize the market equilibrium and examines explicitly the impact of heterogeneity on the market equilibrium and risk premium when the disagreements among the two agents are mean preserved spreads of a benchmark homogeneous belief. It shows that, in market equilibrium, the biased mean preserved spreads in beliefs among the two agents have significant impact on the risk premium of the risky assets and market portfolio, and adding a riskless asset in the market magnifies the impact of the heterogeneity on the market. The results show that both optimism/pessemism and confidence/doubt can increase the market risk premium and reduce the riskfree rate. © 2011 The Authors. Accounting and Finance © 2011 AFAANZ

Index portfolio and welfare analysis under heterogeneous beliefs

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. With a growing popularity of index funds, we adopt a differences-in-opinion, general equilibrium framework to examine theoretically whether investors are better off with an index portfolio than active investing. In contrary to the conventional view, we find that, even for an active investor with the most accurate belief, switching to an index portfolio can significantly improve his expected ex-post welfare when the active investors have incorrect beliefs or face incomplete information. Moreover, the welfare improvement becomes more substantial when the active investors are more risk averse

Profitability of time series momentum

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. We propose a continuous-time heterogeneous agent model consisting of fundamental, momentum, and contrarian traders to explain the significant time series momentum. We show that the performance of momentum strategy is determined by both time horizon and the market dominance of momentum traders. Specifically, when momentum traders are more active in the market, momentum strategies with short (long) time horizons stabilize (destabilize) the market, and meanwhile the market under-reacts (over-reacts) in short-run (long-run). This provides profit opportunity for time series momentum strategies with short horizons and reversal with long horizons. When momentum traders are less active in the market, they always lose. The results provide an insight into the profitability of time series momentum documented in recent empirical studies

Trading heterogeneity under information uncertainty

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. Instead of heuristical heterogeneity assumption in the current heterogeneous agent models (HAMs), we derive the trading heterogeneity by introducing information uncertainty about the fundamental value to a HAM. Conditional on their private information about the fundamental value, agents choose different trading strategies when optimizing their expected utilities. This provides a micro-foundation to heterogeneity and switching behavior of agents. We show that the HAM with trading heterogeneity originating from the incomplete information performs equally well, if not better than existing HAMs, in generating bubbles, crashes, and mean-reverting prices. The simulated time series matches with the S&P 500 in terms of power law distribution in returns, volatility clustering and long memory in volatility

Dynamics of moving average rules in a continuous-time financial market model

Within a continuous-time framework, this paper proposes a stochastic heterogeneous agent model (HAM) of financial markets with time delays to unify various moving average rules used in discrete-time HAMs. The time delay represents a memory length of a moving average rule in discrete-time HAMs. Intuitive conditions for the stability of the fundamental price of the deterministic model in terms of agents' behavior parameters and memory length are obtained. It is found that an increase in memory length not only can destabilize the market price, resulting in oscillatory market price characterized by a Hopf bifurcation, but also can stabilize an otherwise unstable market price, leading to stability switching as the memory length increases. Numerical simulations show that the stochastic model is able to characterize long deviations of the market price from its fundamental price and excess volatility and generate most of the stylized facts observed in financial markets. © 2010

Heterogeneous expectations and exchange rate dynamics

This article presents a continuous-time model of exchange rates not only relying on macroeconomic factors but also having an investor heterogeneity component. The driving macroeconomic factor is the domestic-foreign interest rate differential, while the investor heterogeneity is described by the expectations of boundedly rational portfolio managers who use a weighted average of the expectations of fundamentalists and chartists. Within this framework, the different roles of the macroeconomic factor and investor heterogeneity in the determination of the exchange rate are examined explicitly. We show that this simple model generates very complicated market behaviour, including the existence of multiple steady-state equilibria, deviations of the market exchange rate from the fundamental one and market fluctuations. Numerical simulation of the corresponding stochastic version of the model shows that the model is able to generate typical time series and volatility clustering patterns observed in exchange rate markets. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC