Frontiers of Economic Research
Asset pricing theory abounds with elegant mathematical models. The logic is so compelling that the models are widely used in policy, from banking, investments, and corporate finance to government. To what extent, however, can these models predict what actually happens in financial markets? In The Paradox of Asset Pricing, a leading financial researcher argues forcefully that the empirical record is weak at best. Peter Bossaerts undertakes the most thorough, technically sound investigation in many years into the scientific character of the pricing of financial assets. He probes this conundrum by modeling a decidedly volatile phenomenon that, he says, the world of finance has forgotten in its enthusiasm for the efficient markets hypothesis--speculation.
Bossaerts writes that the existing empirical evidence may be tainted by the assumptions needed to make sense of historical field data or by reanalysis of the same data. To address the first problem, he demonstrates that one central assumption--that markets are efficient processors of information, that risk is a knowable quantity, and so on--can be relaxed substantially while retaining core elements of the existing methodology. The new approach brings novel insights to old data. As for the second problem, he proposes that asset pricing theory be studied through experiments in which subjects trade purposely designed assets for real money. This book will be welcomed by finance scholars and all those math--and statistics-minded readers interested in knowing whether there is science beyond the mathematics of finance.
This book provided the foundation for subsequent journal articles that won two prestigious awards: the 2003 Journal of Financial Markets Best Paper Award and the 2004 Goldman Sachs Asset Management Best Research Paper for the Review of Finance.
A crucial challenge for economists is figuring out how people interpret the world and form expectations that will likely influence their economic activity. Inflation, asset prices, exchange rates, investment, and consumption are just some of the economic variables that are largely explained by expectations. Here George Evans and Seppo Honkapohja bring new explanatory power to a variety of expectation formation models by focusing on the learning factor. Whereas the rational expectations paradigm offers the prevailing method to determining expectations, it assumes very theoretical knowledge on the part of economic actors. Evans and Honkapohja contribute to a growing body of research positing that households and firms learn by making forecasts using observed data, updating their forecast rules over time in response to errors. This book is the first systematic development of the new statistical learning approach.
Depending on the particular economic structure, the economy may converge to a standard rational-expectations or a "rational bubble" solution, or exhibit persistent learning dynamics. The learning approach also provides tools to assess the importance of new models with expectational indeterminacy, in which expectations are an independent cause of macroeconomic fluctuations. Moreover, learning dynamics provide a theory for the evolution of expectations and selection between alternative equilibria, with implications for business cycles, asset price volatility, and policy. This book provides an authoritative treatment of this emerging field, developing the analytical techniques in detail and using them to synthesize and extend existing research.
The economics literature is replete with examples of monotone comparative statics; that is, scenarios where optimal decisions or equilibria in a parameterized collection of models vary monotonically with the parameter. Most of these examples are manifestations of complementarity, with a common explicit or implicit theoretical basis in properties of a super-modular function on a lattice. Supermodular functions yield a characterization for complementarity and extend the notion of complementarity to a general setting that is a natural mathematical context for studying complementarity and monotone comparative statics. Concepts and results related to supermodularity and monotone comparative statics constitute a new and important formal step in the long line of economics literature on complementarity.
This monograph links complementarity to powerful concepts and results involving supermodular functions on lattices and focuses on analyses and issues related to monotone comparative statics. Don Topkis, who is known for his seminal contributions to this area, here presents a self-contained and up-to-date view of this field, including many new results, to scholars interested in economic theory and its applications as well as to those in related disciplines. The emphasis is on methodology. The book systematically develops a comprehensive, integrated theory pertaining to supermodularity, complementarity, and monotone comparative statics. It then applies that theory in the analysis of many diverse economic models formulated as decision problems, noncooperative games, and cooperative games.
Classics in Game Theory assembles in one sourcebook the basic contributions to the field that followed on the publication of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (Princeton, 1944). The theory of games, first given a rigorous formulation by von Neumann in a in 1928, is a subfield of mathematics and economics that models situations in which individuals compete and cooperate with each other. In the "heroic era" of research that began in the late 1940s, the foundations of the current theory were laid; it is these fundamental contributions that are collected in this volume. In the last fifteen years, game theory has become the dominant model in economic theory and has made significant contributions to political science, biology, and international security studies. The central role of game theory in economic theory was recognized by the award of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1994 to the pioneering game theorists John C. Harsanyi, John Nash, and Reinhard Selten. The fundamental works for which they were honored are all included in this volume.
Harold Kuhn, himself a major contributor to game theory for his reformulation of extensive games, has chosen eighteen essays that constitute the core of game theory as it exists today. Drawn from a variety of sources, they will be an invaluable tool for researchers in game theory and for a broad group of students of economics, political science, and biology.
In a major work that is the culmination of over a decade of intensive research, Werner Hildenbrand presents a new theory of market demand, the principal aim of which is to identify the conditions under which the Law of Demand holds true. Hildenbrand argues that the Law of Demand is due mainly to the "heterogeneity" of the population of households. In his view, "rationality" of individual behavior plays only a minor role. While the traditional approach to the theory of market demand is to analyze the question, To what extent are the postulated properties of individual behavior preserved by going from individual to market demand?, this book asks the question, Which properties of the market demand function are created by the aggregation process?.
Two hypotheses on the population of households play a key role in Hilden-brand's thinking. The first is the "increasing dispersion" and the second the "increasing spread" of households' demand. These hypotheses can easily be interpreted and are a priori plausible. For a positive theory of market demand, according to Hildenbrand, it is more important that the hypotheses are well supported by empirical evidence. His claims in this important new book are based on a nonparametric statistical data analysis of the U.K. Family Expenditure Survey and the French Enquête Budget de Famille.
Originally published in 1994.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
