We consider a model of the stock market with delegated portfolio management. All agents are rational: some trade for hedging reasons, some investors optimally contract with portfolio managers who may have stock-picking abilities, and portfolio managers trade optimally given the incentives provided by this contract. Managers try, but sometimes fail, to discover profitable trading opportunities. Although it is best not to trade in this case, their clients cannot distinguish 'actively doing nothing, ' in this sense, from 'simply doing nothing.' Because of this problem: (i) some portfolio managers trade even though they have no reason to prefer one asset to another (noise trade). We also show that, (ii), the amount of such noise trade can be large compared to the amount of hedging volume. Perhaps surprisingly, (iii), noise trade may be Pareto-improving. Noise trade may be viewed as a public good. Results (i) and (ii) are compatible with observed high levels of turnover in securities markets. Result (iii) illustrates some of the possible subtleties of the welfare economics of financial markets.

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This book offers a definitive and wide-ranging overview of developments in behavioral finance over the past ten years. In 1993, the first volume provided the standard reference to this new approach in finance--an approach that, as editor Richard Thaler put it, "entertains the possibility that some of the agents in the economy behave less than fully rationally some of the time." Much has changed since then. Not least, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the subsequent market decline further demonstrated that financial markets often fail to behave as they would if trading were truly dominated by the fully rational investors who populate financial theories. Behavioral finance has made an indelible mark on areas from asset pricing to individual investor behavior to corporate finance, and continues to see exciting empirical and theoretical advances. Advances in Behavioral Finance, Volume II constitutes the essential new resource in the field. It presents twenty recent papers by leading specialists that illustrate the abiding power of behavioral finance--of how specific departures from fully rational decision making by individual market agents can provide explanations of otherwise puzzling market phenomena. As with the first volume, it reaches beyond the world of finance to suggest, powerfully, the importance of pursuing behavioral approaches to other areas of economic life. The contributors are Brad M. Barber, Nicholas Barberis, Shlomo Benartzi, John Y. Campbell, Emil M. Dabora, Daniel Kent, François Degeorge, Kenneth A. Froot, J. B. Heaton, David Hirshleifer, Harrison Hong, Ming Huang, Narasimhan Jegadeesh, Josef Lakonishok, Owen A. Lamont, Roni Michaely, Terrance Odean, Jayendu Patel, Tano Santos, Andrei Shleifer, Robert J. Shiller, Jeremy C. Stein, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Richard H. Thaler, Sheridan Titman, Robert W. Vishny, Kent L. Womack, and Richard Zeckhauser.

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