Introduction In 2000, when Bocconi University launched its Master in Quantitative Finance, I was asked to develop a course touching upon the many aspects of decision theory, financial economics, and microstructure that could not otherwise fit in the tight schedule of the program. Reflecting this heterogeneity, the course was dubbed " Topics in Economics " and I was given a fair amount of leeway...

Financial and capital markets (especially stock markets) are considered high return investment fields, which in the same time are dominated by uncertainty and volatility. Stock market prediction tries to reduce this uncertainty and consequently the risk. As stock markets are influenced by many economical, political and even psychological factors, it is very difficult to forecast the movement of...

Financial literacy of investors reduces uncertainty on future decisions and increases predictability of investment policies in financial markets. Thus, the lack of clear information on financial markets is a determining factor in the arrival of domestic and foreign capitals and their quick exit in case of crisis. The lack of transparency and basic knowledge on decisions and failure to provide r...

We investigate adaptive or evolutionary learning in a repeated version of the Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) model. We demonstrate that any process that is a monotonic selection dynamic will converge to the rational expectations asset demands if the proportion of informed traders is fixed. We also show that these learning processes have a unique asymptotically stable fixed point at the Grossman–S...

Contemporary financial depression of the financial markets proves high fluctuations of the prices of the stocks. These fluctuations have considerable impact on the values of the financial portfolios. Classical approaches to modeling of the behavior of the prices of the stocks may produce wrong predictions of their future values. That is the reason why we introduce in this paper the fractal mark...

We study the influence of the financial market on the decisions of firms in the real market. To that end, we present a model in which the shareholders portfolio selection of assets and the decisions of the publicly-traded firms are integrated through the market process. Financial access alters the objective function of the firms, and the market interaction of shareholders substantially influenc...

The heterogeneity of expectations among traders introduces an important non-linearity into the financial markets. In a series of papers, Brock and Hommes, propose to model economic and financial markets as adaptive belief systems. Asset price fluctuations in adaptive belief systems are characterized by phases of close-to-thefundamental-price fluctuations, phases of optimism where most agents fo...

One of the most significant achievements from theoretical computer science was to show that there are non-computable problems, which cannot be solved through algorithms. Although the formulation of such problems is mathematical, they often can be interpreted as problems derived from other fields, like physics or computer science. However no noncomputable problem with economical or financial ins...

We propose a model where investors may choose to acquire costly information that identifies good assets and purchase these assets in opaque (OTC) markets. Uninformed investors access an asset pool that has been cream-skimmed by informed investors. When the quality composition of assets for sale is fixed there is too much information acquisition and the financial industry extracts excessive rent...

Empirical evidence shows word-of-mouth communication has real effects on trading patterns in financial markets. On top of that, the social network through which the information conveys also plays a crucial role. We propose a framework that allows informed traders to directly and truthfully communicate information in four major social interaction structures represented by circle, tree, star and ...