Learning from Others in the Financial Market

Abstract

Prediction problems in finance go beyond estimating the unknown parameters of a model (e.g. of expected returns). This is because such a model would have to include parameters governing the market participants' propensity to change their opinions on the validity of that model. This leads to a well--known circular situation characteristic of financial markets, where participants collectively create the future they wish to estimate. In this paper, we introduce a framework for organizing multiple expectation models and study the conditions under which they are adopted by a majority of market participants.