The ways financial analysts, traders, and other specialists use information and learn from each other are of fundamental importance to understanding how markets work and prices are set. This graduate-level textbook analyzes how markets aggregate information and examines the impacts of specific market arrangements--or microstructure--on the aggregation process and overall performance of financial markets. Xavier Vives bridges the gap between the two primary views of markets--informational efficiency and herding--and uses a coherent game-theoretic framework to bring together the latest results from the rational expectations and herding literatures. Vives emphasizes the consequences of market interaction and social learning for informational and economic efficiency. He looks closely at information aggregation mechanisms, progressing from simple to complex environments: from static to dynamic models; from competitive to strategic agents; and from simple market strategies such as noncontingent orders or quantities to complex ones like price contingent orders or demand schedules. Vives finds that contending theories like informational efficiency and herding build on the same principles of Bayesian decision making and that "irrational" agents are not needed to explain herding behavior, booms, and crashes. As this book shows, the microstructure of a market is the crucial factor in the informational efficiency of prices. Provides the most complete analysis of the ways markets aggregate information Bridges the gap between the rational expectations and herding literatures Includes exercises with solutions Serves both as a graduate textbook and a resource for researchers, including financial analysts

Abstract: Black and Scholes (1973) implied volatilities tend to be systematically related to the option's exercise price and time to expiration. Derman and Kani (1994), Dupire (1994), and Rubinstein (1994) attribute this behavior to the fact that the Black-Scholes constant volatility assumption is violated in practice. These authors hypothesize that the volatility of the underlying asset's return is a deterministic function of the asset price and time and develop the deterministic volatility function (DVF) option valuation model, which has the potential of fitting the observed cross-section of option prices exactly. Using a sample of S & P 500 index options during the period June 1988 through December 1993, we evaluate the economic significance of the implied deterministic volatility function by examining the predictive and hedging performance of the DV option valuation model. We find that its performance is worse than that of an ad hoc Black-Scholes model with variable implied volatilities.

Portfolio risk forecasting has been and continues to be an active research field for both academics and practitioners. Almost all institutional investment management firms use quantitative models for their portfolio forecasting, and researchers have explored models' econometric foundations, relative performance, and implications for capital market behavior and asset pricing equilibrium. Portfolio Risk Analysis provides an insightful and thorough overview of financial risk modeling, with an emphasis on practical applications, empirical reality, and historical perspective. Beginning with mean-variance analysis and the capital asset pricing model, the authors give a comprehensive and detailed account of factor models, which are the key to successful risk analysis in every economic climate. Topics range from the relative merits of fundamental, statistical, and macroeconomic models, to GARCH and other time series models, to the properties of the VIX volatility index. The book covers both mainstream and alternative asset classes, and includes in-depth treatments of model integration and evaluation. Credit and liquidity risk and the uncertainty of extreme events are examined in an intuitive and rigorous way. An extensive literature review accompanies each topic. The authors complement basic modeling techniques with references to applications, empirical studies, and advanced mathematical texts. This book is essential for financial practitioners, researchers, scholars, and students who want to understand the nature of financial markets or work toward improving them.

Written by one of the leading authorities in market microstructure research, this book provides a comprehensive guide to the theoretical work in this important area of finance.