Pour le cinquième cours à l’X, sur les asymétries d’information, les slides sont en ligne, ainsi que les énoncés des exercices. Je ferais PC l’après midi, salle 75, bâtiment Paul Levy. Sinon la page maintenue par Alfred Galichon se trouve ici. Petit complément sur le paradoxe de Grossman et Stiglitz, étudié en exercice (i.e. si un marché est efficient du point de vue de l’information, autrement dit toute l’information pertinente est contenue dans les prix de marché, alors aucun agent n’est incité à acquérir de l’information sur laquelle sont fondés les prix),
“Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) argued that because information is costly, prices cannot perfectly reflect the information which is available, since if it did, those who spent resources to obtain it would receive no compensation, leading to the conclusion that an informationally efficient market is impossible.” Sewell (2006)
” Second, perfect efficiency is an unrealistic benchmark that is unlikely to hold in practice. Even in theory, as Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) have shown, abnormal returns will exist if there are costs of gathering and processing information. These returns are necessary to compensate investors for their information-gathering and information-processing expenses, and are no longer abnormal when these expenses are properly accounted for. In a large and liquid market, information costs are likely to justify only small abnormal returns, but it is difficult to say how small, even if such costs could be measured precisely.” Campbell, Lo and MacKinlay (1997), page 24
” Grossman (1976) and Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) go even further. They argue that perfectly informationally efficient markets are an impossibility, for if markets are perfectly efficient, the return to gathering information is nil, in which case there would be little reason to trade and markets would eventually collapse. Alternatively, the degree of market inefficiency determines the efforrt investors are willing to expend to gather and trade on information, hence a non-degenerate market equilibrium will arise only when there are sufficient profit opportunities, i.e., inefficiencies, to compensate investors for the costs of trading and information-gathering. The profits earned by these industrious investors may be viewed as economic rents that accrue to those willing to engage in such activities.” Lo and MacKinlay (1999), pages 5-6
Pour compléter le dernier paragraphe de l’article de l’Argus de l’assurance, sur la comparaison entre la finance et l’assurance
