The ways financial analysts, traders, and other specialists use information and learn from each other are of fundamental importance to understanding how markets work and prices are set. This graduate-level textbook analyzes how markets aggregate information and examines the impacts of specific market arrangements--or microstructure--on the aggregation process and overall performance of financial markets. Xavier Vives bridges the gap between the two primary views of markets--informational efficiency and herding--and uses a coherent game-theoretic framework to bring together the latest results from the rational expectations and herding literatures. Vives emphasizes the consequences of market interaction and social learning for informational and economic efficiency. He looks closely at information aggregation mechanisms, progressing from simple to complex environments: from static to dynamic models; from competitive to strategic agents; and from simple market strategies such as noncontingent orders or quantities to complex ones like price contingent orders or demand schedules. Vives finds that contending theories like informational efficiency and herding build on the same principles of Bayesian decision making and that "irrational" agents are not needed to explain herding behavior, booms, and crashes. As this book shows, the microstructure of a market is the crucial factor in the informational efficiency of prices. Provides the most complete analysis of the ways markets aggregate information Bridges the gap between the rational expectations and herding literatures Includes exercises with solutions Serves both as a graduate textbook and a resource for researchers, including financial analysts

Product Description: A volume that takes stock and looks ahead on the development and implementation of competition policy in the European Union fifty years after the Treaty of Rome. Competition policy has emerged as a key policy in the EU with competition acting as the driving force for economic efficiency and the welfare of citizens...read more

Corporate governance is an active area of research and public debate. The recent generalization of "shareholder value" ideas and institutional investment, the establishment of codes of best practice for boards of directors, and the controversy about whether market oriented or bank/relations oriented systems are better for economic performance provide cogent examples. The volume takes stock of the most recent research in the topic, criticizes the standard agency view, and presents new ideas and analysis about the role of competition, the political economy of corporate governance, and the effects of different systems on growth and performance.

Product Description: The European banking industry is in a state of turmoil. The pace of mergers and acquisitions has accelerated across different banking sectors and within the same sector. At the same time, the demise of banks already in trouble has accelerated...read more

Product Description: Financial intermediation is currently a subject of active academic research on both sides of the Atlantic. European financial integration raises major policy issues about the risks of banking competition and the appropriate regulation of banks and other financial intermediaries...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)