 Natural Selection and Market Efficiency in a Futures Market with Random ShocksGuo Ying Luo Journal of Futures Markets, 2001, vol. 21, issue 6, 489-516 Abstract: Even when participants know very little about their environment, the market itself, by serving as a selection process of information, promotes an efficient aggregate outcome. To emphasize the role of the market and the importance of natural selection rather than the strategic actions of participants, an evolutionary model of a commodity futures market is presented, in which there is a continual inflow of unsophisticated traders with predetermined distributions of prediction errors with respect to the fundamental value of the spot price. The market acts as a selection process by constantly shifting wealth from traders with less accurate information to those with more accurate information. Consequently, with probability 1, if the volatility of the underlying spot market is sufficiently small, the proportion of time that the futures price is sufficiently close to the fundamental value converges to one. Furthermore, the width of the interval containing the fundamental value, where the futures price eventually lies, increases as the volatility of the underlying spot market increases. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 21:489–516, 2001 Date: 2001 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:jfutmk:v:21:y:2001:i:6:p:489-516 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Journal of Futures Markets is currently edited by Robert I. Webb More articles in Journal of Futures Markets from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
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