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1 vote
pdf ps other (41 views, 40 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.
1 vote
pdf (33 views, 25 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.
1 vote
pdf other (42 views, 34 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.
0 vote
other (104 views, 55 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.
0 vote
ps (38 views, 25 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.
1 vote
pdf (52 views, 36 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.
1 vote
pdf other (35 views, 34 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.
1 vote
pdf ps other (52 views, 54 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.
1 vote
pdf other (137 views, 38 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.
1 vote
pdf ps other (56 views, 56 downloads, 0 comments) [show abstract]
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.