We consider a competitive and perfect financial market in which agents have heterogeneous cash flow valuations. Instead of assuming that agents are endowed with rational expectations, we model their behavior as the product of adaptive learning. Our results demonstrate that adaptive learning affects security design profoundly, with securities mispriced even in the long run and optimal designs trading off underpricing against intrinsic value maximization. The evolutionary dominant security design calls for issuing securities that engender large losses with a small but positive probability, but that otherwise produce stable payoffs, almost the exact opposite of the pure state claims that are optimal in the rational expectations framework. Copyright 2006 by The American Finance Association.
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Volume (Year): 61 (2006) Issue (Month): 5 (October) Pages: 2103-2135 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Franklin Allen, Douglas Gale, 1988.
"Optimal Security Design,"
Review of Financial Studies,
Oxford University Press for Society for Financial Studies, vol. 1(3), pages 229-263.
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