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research article

Ambiguity in Asset Markets: Theory and Experiment

Bossaerts, Peter  
•
Ghirardato, Paolo
•
Guarnaschelli, Serena
Show more
2010
Review Of Financial Studies

This paper studies the impact of ambiguity and ambiguity aversion on equilibrium asset prices and portfolio holdings in competitive financial markets. It argues that attitudes toward ambiguity are heterogeneous across the population, just as attitudes toward risk are heterogeneous across the population, but that heterogeneity of attitudes toward ambiguity has different implications than heterogeneity of attitudes toward risk. In particular, when some state probabilities are not known, agents who are sufficiently ambiguity averse find open sets of prices for which they refuse to hold an ambiguous portfolio. This suggests a different cross section of portfolio choices, a wider range of state price/probability ratios, and different rankings of state price/probability ratios than would be predicted if state probabilities were known. Experiments confirm all of these suggestions. Our findings contradict the claim that investors who have cognitive biases do not affect prices because they are inframarginal: ambiguity-averse investors have an indirect effect on prices because they change the per capita amount of risk that is to be shared among the marginal investors. Our experimental data also suggest a positive correlation between risk aversion and ambiguity aversion that might explain the "value effect" in historical data. (JEL G11, G12, C92, D53)

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1013/rfs/hhp106
Web of Science ID

WOS:000276553800001

Author(s)
Bossaerts, Peter  
Ghirardato, Paolo
Guarnaschelli, Serena
Zame, William R.
Date Issued

2010

Published in
Review Of Financial Studies
Volume

23

Start page

1325

End page

1359

Subjects

Decision-Making

•

Prices

•

Uncertainty

•

Growth

•

Model

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
SFI-PB  
Available on Infoscience
December 16, 2011
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/75603
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