Giovanni Cespa

The Beauty Contest and Short-Term Trading

We consider a two-period market with persistent liquidity trading and risk averse privately informed investors who have a one period horizon. With persistence, prices reflect average expectations about fundamentals and liquidity trading. Informed investors engage in “retrospective” learning to reassess the inference about fundamentals made at the early stage of the trading game. This introduces strategic complementarities in the use of information and can yield two stable equilibria which can be ranked in terms of liquidity, volatility, and informational efficiency. We establish the limits of the beauty contest analogy for financial markets and derive a rich set of implications to explain market anomalies, and empirical regularities.

Sale of Price Information by Exchanges: Does It Promote Price Discovery?

Exchanges sell both trading services and price information. We study how the joint pricing of these products affects price discovery and the distribution of gains from trade in an asset market. A wider dissemination of price information reduces pricing errors and the transfer from liquidity traders to speculators. This effect reduces the fee that speculators are willing to pay for trading. Therefore, to raise its revenue from trading, a for-profit exchange optimally charges a high fee for price information so that only a fraction of speculators buy this information. As a result, price discovery is not as efficient as it would be with free price information. This problem is less severe if the exchange must compensate liquidity traders for a fraction of their losses. This paper was accepted by Wei Xiong, finance.