IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jetheo/v147y2012i1p310-335.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Conservative traders, natural selection and market efficiency

Author

Listed:
  • Luo, Guo Ying

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of conservative traders on market efficiency in an evolutionary model of a commodity futures market. This paper shows that the long-run market outcome is informationally efficient, as long as in every period there is a positive probability that entering traders are more conservative than their predecessors. Conservative traders are those who correctly predict the spot price with a positive probability, and more importantly, who in their mistakes err on the side of caution, and rarely overpredict the spot price as buyers, and underpredict the spot price as sellers. This result does not require entry of traders with better information than their predecessors.

Suggested Citation

  • Luo, Guo Ying, 2012. "Conservative traders, natural selection and market efficiency," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 147(1), pages 310-335.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:147:y:2012:i:1:p:310-335
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2011.10.016
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053111001499
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jet.2011.10.016?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. George J. Mailath & Alvaro Sandroni, 2003. "Market Selection and Asymmetric Information," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 70(2), pages 343-368.
    2. Patel, Jayendu & Zeckhauser, Richard & Hendricks, Darryll, 1991. "The Rationality Struggle: Illustrations from Financial Markets," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 81(2), pages 232-236, May.
    3. Shlomo Benartzi & Richard H. Thaler, 1995. "Myopic Loss Aversion and the Equity Premium Puzzle," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(1), pages 73-92.
    4. Hirshleifer, David & Luo, Guo Ying, 2001. "On the survival of overconfident traders in a competitive securities market," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 4(1), pages 73-84, January.
    5. Leonid Kogan & Stephen A. Ross & Jiang Wang & Mark M. Westerfield, 2006. "The Price Impact and Survival of Irrational Traders," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 61(1), pages 195-229, February.
    6. Kyle, Albert S & Wang, F Albert, 1997. "Speculation Duopoly with Agreement to Disagree: Can Overconfidence Survive the Market Test?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(5), pages 2073-2090, December.
    7. Benos, Alexandros V., 1998. "Aggressiveness and survival of overconfident traders," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 1(3-4), pages 353-383, September.
    8. Biais, Bruno & Shadur, Raphael, 2000. "Darwinian selection does not eliminate irrational traders," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 44(3), pages 469-490, March.
    9. Alvaro Sandroni, 2000. "Do Markets Favor Agents Able to Make Accurate Predicitions?," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 68(6), pages 1303-1342, November.
    10. De Long, J Bradford & Shleifer, Andrei & Summers, Lawrence H & Waldmann, Robert J, 1991. "The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial Markets," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 64(1), pages 1-19, January.
    11. Sandroni, Alvaro, 2005. "Market selection when markets are incomplete," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(1-2), pages 91-104, February.
    12. Luo, Guo Ying, 2003. "Evolution, efficiency and noise traders in a one-sided auction market," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 6(2), pages 163-197, April.
    13. Emanuela Sciubba, 2005. "Asymmetric information and survival in financial markets," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 25(2), pages 353-379, February.
    14. Herbert A. Simon, 1955. "A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 69(1), pages 99-118.
    15. Luo, Guo Ying, 1998. "Market Efficiency and Natural Selection in a Commodity Futures Market," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 11(3), pages 647-674.
    16. Luo Guo Ying, 1995. "Evolution and Market Competition," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 67(1), pages 223-250, October.
    17. Luo, Guo Ying, 2009. "Irrationality and monopolistic competition: An evolutionary approach," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 53(5), pages 512-526, July.
    18. Beker, Pablo F., 2004. "Are inefficient entrepreneurs driven out of the market?," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 114(2), pages 329-344, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Philip Kostov & Sophia Davidova, 2023. "Smallholders Are Not the Same: Under the Hood of Kosovo Agriculture," Land, MDPI, vol. 12(1), pages 1-16, January.
    2. Thomas Holtfort, 2019. "From standard to evolutionary finance: a literature survey," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 69(2), pages 207-232, June.
    3. Kostov, Philip & Davidova, Sophia, 2017. "One size does not fit all: an empirical investigation of the Romanian agriculture production function," 91st Annual Conference, April 24-26, 2017, Royal Dublin Society, Dublin, Ireland 258642, Agricultural Economics Society.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Andrew W. Lo & H. Allen Orr & Ruixun Zhang, 2018. "The growth of relative wealth and the Kelly criterion," Journal of Bioeconomics, Springer, vol. 20(1), pages 49-67, April.
    2. Hongjun Yan, 2008. "Natural Selection in Financial Markets: Does It Work?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 54(11), pages 1935-1950, November.
    3. Jasmina Hasanhodzic & Andrew Lo & Emanuele Viola, 2011. "A computational view of market efficiency," Quantitative Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 11(7), pages 1043-1050.
    4. Hirshleifer, David & Lo, Andrew W. & Zhang, Ruixun, 2023. "Social contagion and the survival of diverse investment styles," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 154(C).
    5. Thomas J. Brennan & Andrew W. Lo & Ruixun Zhang, 2018. "Variety Is the Spice of Life: Irrational Behavior as Adaptation to Stochastic Environments," Quarterly Journal of Finance (QJF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 8(03), pages 1-39, September.
    6. David Hirshleifer, 2001. "Investor Psychology and Asset Pricing," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(4), pages 1533-1597, August.
    7. Dindo, Pietro, 2019. "Survival in speculative markets," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 181(C), pages 1-43.
    8. Glaser, Markus & Nöth, Markus & Weber, Martin, 2003. "Behavioral finance," Papers 03-14, Sonderforschungsbreich 504.
    9. Andrew W. Lo & Mila Getmansky & Peter A. Lee, 2015. "Hedge Funds: A Dynamic Industry in Transition," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 7(1), pages 483-577, December.
    10. Kenneth Yung & Yen-Chih Liu, 2009. "Implications of futures trading volume: Hedgers versus speculators," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 10(5), pages 318-337, December.
    11. Diego García & Francesco Sangiorgi & Branko Urošević, 2007. "Overconfidence and Market Efficiency with Heterogeneous Agents," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 30(2), pages 313-336, February.
    12. Caliendo, Frank & Huang, Kevin X.D., 2008. "Overconfidence and consumption over the life cycle," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 30(4), pages 1347-1369, December.
    13. Hirshleifer, David & Luo, Guo Ying, 2001. "On the survival of overconfident traders in a competitive securities market," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 4(1), pages 73-84, January.
    14. Tarek Coury & Emanuela Sciubba, 2012. "Belief heterogeneity and survival in incomplete markets," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 49(1), pages 37-58, January.
    15. Hirshleifer, David & Subrahmanyam, Avanidhar & Titman, Sheridan, 2006. "Feedback and the success of irrational investors," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(2), pages 311-338, August.
    16. Michailova, Julija, 2010. "Overconfidence, Risk Aversion and Individual Financial Decisions in Experimental Asset Markets," MPRA Paper 53114, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised Jan 2014.
    17. Chuang, Wen-I & Susmel, Rauli, 2011. "Who is the more overconfident trader? Individual vs. institutional investors," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 35(7), pages 1626-1644, July.
    18. Maria do Rosario CORREIA & Christian GOKUS & Andrew Hughes HALLETT & Christian R. RICHTER, 2016. "A Dynamic Analysis of the Determinants of the Greek Credit Default Swaps," Journal of Economics and Political Economy, KSP Journals, vol. 3(2), pages 350-376, June.
    19. Lensberg, Terje & Schenk-Hoppé, Klaus Reiner, 2006. "On the Evolution of Investment Strategies and the Kelly Rule – A Darwinian Approach," Discussion Papers 2006/23, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Business and Management Science.
    20. Gary Charness & Uri Gneezy, 2010. "Portfolio Choice And Risk Attitudes: An Experiment," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 48(1), pages 133-146, January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Conservative traders; Evolution; Survivor; Market rationality; Natural selection; Market efficiency;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G13 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Contingent Pricing; Futures Pricing
    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading
    • D8 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:147:y:2012:i:1:p:310-335. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/622869 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.