According to economic theory, supported by empirical and laboratory evidence, the equilibrium price of a financial security reflects all of the information regarding the security's value. We investigate the dynamics of the computational process on the path toward equilibrium, where information distributed among traders is revealed stepby -step over time and incorporated into the market price. We develop a simplified model of an information market, along with trading strategies, in order to formalize the computational properties of the process. We show that securities whose payoffs cannot be expressed as a weighted threshold function of distributed input bits are not guaranteed to converge to the proper equilibrium predicted by economic theory. On the other hand, securities whose payoffs are threshold functions are guaranteed to converge, for all prior probability distributions. Moreover, these threshold securities converge in at most n rounds, where n is the number of bits of distributed information. We also prove a lower bound, showing a type of threshold security that requires at least n/2 rounds to converge in the worst case.

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One of the main reasons of the recent success of peer to peer (P2P) file sharing systems such as BitTorrent is its built-in tit-for-tat mechanism. In this paper, we model the bandwidth allocation in a P2P system as an exchange economy and study a tit-for-tat dynamics, namely the proportional response dynamics, in this economy. In a proportional response dynamics each player distributes its good to its neighbors proportional to the utility it received from them in the last period. We show that this dynamics not only converges but converges to a market equilibrium, a standard economic characterization of efficient exchanges in a competitive market. In addition, for some classes of utility functions we consider, it converges much faster than the classical tâtonnement process and any existing algorithms for computing market equilibria. As a part of our proof we study the double normalization of a matrix, an operation that linearly scales the rows of a matrix so that each row sums to a prescribed positive number, followed by a similar scaling of the columns. We show that the double normalization process of any non-negative matrix always converges. This complements the previous studies in matrix scaling that has focused on the convergence condition of the process when the row and column normalizations are considered as separate steps. 1

Abstract: A model of fiat money is constructed in which spatial separation and the logistics of communication are made explicit as in search theory, but in which exchange is organized by profit-seeking business enterprises as in all market economies. Firms mitigate search costs by opening shops that are easily located. Equilibria may exist in which fiat money is used as a universal medium of exchange. When a monetary equilibrium exists, fiat money is essential. The model provides a foundation to cash-in-advance theory, without specifying in advance that one object will be used as the universal medium of exchange JEL Classification: E40

We examine price formation in a simple static model with asymmetric information, an infinite number of risk neutral traders and no noise traders. Here we re-examine four results associated with rational expectations models relating to the existence of fully revealing equilibrium prices, the advantage of becoming informed, the costly acquisition of information, and the impossibility of having equilibrium prices with higher volatility than the underlying fundamentals.

We consider the problem of allocating a fixed amount of an infinitely divisible resource among multiple competing, fully rational users. We study the efficiency guarantees that are possible when we restrict to mechanisms that satisfy certain scalability constraints motivated by large scale communication networks; in particular, we restrict attention to mechanisms where users are restricted to one-dimensional strategy spaces. We first study the efficiency guarantees possible when the mechanism is not allowed to price differentiate. We study the worst-case efficiency loss (ratio of the utility associated with a Nash equilibrium to the maximum possible utility), and show that the proportional allocation mechanism of Kelly (1997) minimizes the efficiency loss when users are price anticipating. We then turn our attention to mechanisms where price differentiation is permitted; using an adaptation of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves class of mechanisms, we construct a class of mechanisms with one-dimensional strategy spaces where Nash equilibria are fully efficient. These mechanisms are shown to be fully efficient even in general convex environments, under reasonable assumptions. Our results highlight a fundamental insight in mechanism design: when the pricing flexibility available to the mechanism designer is limited, restricting the strategic flexibility of bidders may actually improve the efficiency guarantee.

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Much evidence supports that financial markets have the ability to aggregate information. When tied to a random variable, a financial market can forecast the value of the random variable. It then becomes a prediction market. We establish a model of prediction markets with aggregate uncertainty, and theoretically characterize some fundamental properties of prediction markets. Specifically, we have shown that a prediction market is guaranteed to converge to an equilibrium, where traders have consensus on the forecast. The best possible prediction a prediction market can make is the direct communication equilibrium. However, prediction markets do not always converge to it. We have proved that a sufficient condition for the convergence to the direct communication equilibrium under our model is that the private information of each trader, conditioned on the state of the world, is identically and independently distributed. Furthermore, if this condition is satisfied, the prediction market converges in at most two rounds. 1

Simple models of nancial markets with heterogeneous adaptive agents have been recently investigated using tools of statistical mechanics of disordered systems. We review and discuss the main results of this approach.

In an economy with commodity-pairwise trading posts and transaction costs, commodity money is endogenously determined in general equilibrium. Absent double coincidence of wants, the lowtransaction cost commodity (with the narrowest proportional bid/ask price spread) becomes the common medium of exchange.