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The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis: Market Efficiency from an Evolutionary Perspective

  • Paper
  • Aug 15, 2004
  • #Economics #ComplexSystems
Andrew W. Lo
@andrewwlo
(Author)
stat.wharton.upenn.edu
Read on stat.wharton.upenn.edu
1 Recommender
1 Mention
One of the most influential ideas in the past 30 years of the Journal of Portfolio Management is the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, the idea that market prices incorporate all inform... Show More

One of the most influential ideas in the past 30 years of the Journal of Portfolio Management is the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, the idea that market prices incorporate all information rationally and instantaneously. However, the emerging discipline of behavioral economics and finance has challenged this hypothesis, arguing that markets are not rational, but are driven by fear and greed instead. Recent research in the cognitive neurosciences suggests that these two perspectives are opposite sides of the same coin. In this article I propose a new framework that reconciles market efficiency with behavioral alternatives by applying the principles of evolution—competition, adaptation, and natural selection—to financial interactions. By extending Herbert Simon’s notion of “satisficing” with evolutionary dynamics, I argue that much of what behavioralists cite as counterexamples to economic rationality—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, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis offers a number of surprisingly concrete implications for the practice of portfolio management.

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Allen Farrington @AllenFarrington · Mar 2, 2022
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  • From www.amazon.com
As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, of all of the dissenting work on the EMH, we most recommend by far, Andrew Lo’s “adaptive markets hypothesis” the original paper and the follow up book of the same name, as well as the various thoughts of Benoit Mandelbrot on fractals in financial markets - strewn across numerous academic papers but lucidly conveyed in the popular book the “misbehaviour of markets” and George Gilder’s “knowledge and power”
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