Lecture: Unifying Efficient Markets with Behavioral Finance
Andrew Lo, Harris & Harris Group Professor and Director, MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering will be the guest speaker at this week's Finance Seminar Series. He will be speaking about his papers in regard to unifying efficient markets with behavioral finance. All are invited to attend.
Abstract
The battle between proponents of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and champions of behavioral finance has never been more pitched, and little consensus exists as to which side is winning or the implications for investment management and consulting. In this article, I review the case for and against the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and describe a new framework—the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis—in which the traditional models of modern financial economics can coexist alongside behavioral models in an intellectually consistent manner. Based on evolutionary principles, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis implies that the degree of market efficiency is related to environmental factors characterizing market ecology such as the number of competitors in the market, the magnitude of profit opportunities available, and the adaptability of the market participants. Many of the examples that behavioralists cite as violations of rationality that are inconsistent with market efficiency—loss aversion, overconfidence, overreaction, mental accounting, and other behavioral biases—are, in fact, consistent with an evolutionary model of individuals adapting to a changing environment via simple heuristics. Despite the qualitative nature of this new paradigm, I show that the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis yields a number of surprisingly concrete applications for both investment managers and consultants.
Click here to view the entire paper " The Adaptive Market Hypothesis" in Adobe PDF format.
Click here to find out more about the Finance Seminar Series.
