We propose a continuous time model for financial markets with proportional
transactions costs and a continuum of risky assets. This is motivated by bond
markets in which the continuum of assets corresponds to the continuum of
possible maturities. Our framework is well adapted to the study of no-arbitrage
properties and related hedging problems. In particular, we extend the
Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing of Guasoni, R\'asonyi and L\'epinette
(2012) which concentrates on the one dimensional case. Namely, we prove that
the Robust No Free Lunch with Vanishing Risk assumption is equivalent to the
existence of a Strictly Consistent Price System. Interestingly, the presence of
transaction costs allows a natural definition of trading strategies and avoids
all the technical and un-natural restrictions due to stochastic integration
that appear in bond models without friction. We restrict to the case where
exchange rates are continuous in time and leave the general c\`adl\`ag case for
further studies.
We consider the problem of belief aggregation: given a group of individual
agents with probabilistic beliefs over a set of uncertain events, formulate a
sensible consensus or aggregate probability distribution over these events.
Researchers have proposed many aggregation methods, although on the question of
which is best the general consensus is that there is no consensus. We develop a
market-based approach to this problem, where agents bet on uncertain events by
buying or selling securities contingent on their outcomes. Each agent acts in
the market so as to maximize expected utility at given securities prices,
limited in its activity only by its own risk aversion. The equilibrium prices
of goods in this market represent aggregate beliefs. For agents with constant
risk aversion, we demonstrate that the aggregate probability exhibits several
desirable properties, and is related to independently motivated techniques. We
argue that the market-based approach provides a plausible mechanism for belief
aggregation in multiagent systems, as it directly addresses self-motivated
agent incentives for participation and for truthfulness, and can provide a
decision-theoretic foundation for the "expert weights" often employed in
centralized pooling techniques.
We characterize the statistical bootstrap for the estimation of
information-theoretic quantities from data, with particular reference to its
use in the study of large-scale social phenomena. Our methods allow one to
preserve, approximately, the underlying axiomatic relationships of information
theory---in particular, consistency under arbitrary coarse-graining---that
motivate use of these quantities in the first place, while providing
reliability comparable to the state of the art for Bayesian estimators. We show
how information-theoretic quantities allow for rigorous empirical study of the
decision-making capacities of rational agents, and the time-asymmetric flows of
information in distributed systems. We provide illustrative examples by
reference to ongoing collaborative work on the semantic structure of the
British Criminal Court system and the conflict dynamics of the contemporary
Afghanistan insurgency.
The present paper takes it as an indisputable fact that subjective-behavioral
thinking leads, for deeper methodological reasons, with inner necessity to
inconclusive filibustering about the agents’ economic conduct and therefore
has to be replaced by something fundamentally different. The key argument
runs as follows: (a) the subjective-behavioral approach can not, as a matter of
principle, afford a correct profit theory, (b) without a correct profit theory it
is impossible to comprehend how the monetary economy works, (c) without
this knowledge economic policy proposals are unjustifiable, (d) thinking like
an economist may be hazardous to the economy.
We consider the dynamics of Q learning in two-player two-action games with a Boltzmann exploration mechanism. For any nonzero exploration rate the dynamics is dissipative, which guarantees that agent strategies converge to rest points that are generally different from the game's Nash equlibria (NEs). We provide a comprehensive characterization of the rest point structure for different games and examine the sensitivity of this structure with respect to the noise due to exploration. Our results indicate that for a class of games with multiple NEs the asymptotic behavior of learning dynamics can undergo drastic changes at critical exploration rates. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, for certain games with a single NE, it is possible to have additional rest points (not corresponding to any NE) that persist for a finite range of the exploration rates and disappear when the exploration rates of both players tend to zero.
We review the main changes in the interbank market after the financial crisis
started in August 2007. In particular, we focus on the fixed income market and
we analyse the most relevant empirical evidences regarding the divergence of
the existing basis between interbank rates with different tenor, such as Libor
and OIS. We also discuss a qualitative explanation of these effects based on
the consideration of credit and liquidity variables. Then, we focus our
attention on the diffusion of collateral agreements among OTC derivatives
market counterparties, and on the consequent change of paradigm for pricing
derivatives. We illustrate the main qualitative features of the new market
practice, called CSA discounting, and we point out the most relevant issues for
market players associated to its adoption.
Community detection in social graphs has attracted researchers' interest for
a long time. With the widespread of social networks on the Internet it has
recently become an important research domain. Most contributions focus upon the
definition of algorithms for optimizing the so-called modularity function. In
the first place interest was limited to unipartite graph inputs and partitioned
community outputs. Recently bipartite graphs, directed graphs and overlapping
communities have been investigated. Few contributions embrace at the same time
the three types of nodes. In this paper we present a method which unifies
commmunity detection for the three types of nodes and at the same time merges
partitionned and overlapping communities. Moreover results are visualized in
such a way that they can be analyzed and semantically interpreted. For
validation we experiment this method on well known simple benchmarks. It is
then applied to real data in three cases. In two examples of photos sets with
tagged people we reveal social networks. A second type of application is of
particularly interest. After applying our method to Human Brain Tractography
Data provided by a team of neurologists, we produce clusters of white fibers in
accordance with other well known clustering methods. Moreover our approach for
visualizing overlapping clusters allows better understanding of the results by
the neurologist team. These last results open up the possibility of applying
community detection methods in other domains such as data analysis with
original enhanced performances.
We study the crash dynamics of the Warsaw Stock Exchange (WSE) by using the
Minimal Spanning Tree (MST) networks. We find the transition of the complex
network during its evolution from a (hierarchical) power law MST network,
representing the stable state of WSE before the recent worldwide financial
crash, to a superstar-like (or superhub) MST network of the market decorated by
a hierarchy of trees (being, perhaps, an unstable, intermediate market state).
Subsequently, we observed a transition from this complex tree to the topology
of the (hierarchical) power law MST network decorated by several star-like
trees or hubs. This structure and topology represent, perhaps, the WSE after
the worldwide financial crash, and could be considered to be an aftershock. Our
results can serve as an empirical foundation for a future theory of dynamic
structural and topological phase transitions on financial markets.
For several decades, a leading paradigm of how to quantitatively assess
scientific research has been the analysis of the aggregated citation
information in a set of scientific publications. Although the representation of
this information as a citation network has already been coined in the 1960s, it
needed the systematic indexing of scientific literature to allow for impact
metrics that actually made use of this network as a whole improving on the then
prevailing metrics that were almost exclusively based on the number of direct
citations. However, besides focusing on the assignment of credit, the paper
citation network can also be studied in terms of the proliferation of
scientific ideas. Here we introduce a simple measure based on the
shortest-paths in the paper's in-component or, simply speaking, on the shape
and size of the wake of a paper within the citation network. Applied to a
citation network containing Physical Review publications from more than a
century, our approach is able to detect seminal articles which have introduced
concepts of obvious importance to the further development of physics. We
observe a large fraction of papers co-authored by Nobel Prize laureates in
physics among the top-ranked publications.
Based on the formation of triad junctions, the proposed mechanism generates
networks that exhibit extended rather than single power law behavior. Triad
formation guarantees strong neighborhood clustering and community-level
characteristics as the network size grows to infinity. The asymptotic behavior
is of interest in the study of directed networks in which (i) the formation of
links cannot be described according to the principle of preferential
attachment; (ii) the in-degree distribution fits a power law for nodes with a
high degree and an exponential form otherwise; (iii) clustering properties
emerge at multiple scales and depend on both the number of links that newly
added nodes establish and the probability of forming triads; and (iv) groups of
nodes form modules that feature less links to the rest of the nodes.