Unbiased Disagreement and the Efficient Market Hypothesis

Abstract

Can investors with irrational beliefs be neglected as long as they are rational on average? Does unbiased diagreement lead to trades that cancel out with no consequences on prices, as implicitly assumed by the traditional models? We show in this paper that there is an important impact of unbiased disagreement on the behavior of financial markets, even though the pricing formulas are "on average" (over the states of the world) unchanged. In particular we obtain time varying, mean reverting and countercyclical (instead of constant in the standard model) market prices of risk, mean reverting and procyclical (instead of constant) risk free rates, decreasing (instead of flat) yield curves, possibly higher returns and higher risk premia in the long run (instead of a flat structure), momentum in stock returns in the short run, more variance on returns, time and state varying (instead of constant) risk sharing rules, as well as more important and procyclical trading volumes. These features seem consistent with the actual behavior of financial markets and only result from the introduction of unbiased disagreement.

Keywords: disagreement, efficient market hypothesis, momentum, mean-reversion, noisy beliefs, countercyclical risk premium, procyclical interest rates

JEL Classification: G12, G14, D84, E44