Asset Prices and Asymmetric Reasoning

We present a theory and experimental evidence on pricing and portfolio choices under asymmetric reasoning. We show that under asymmetric reasoning, prices do not reflect all (types of) reasoning. Some agents who observe prices that cannot be reconciled with their reasoning switch from perceiving the environment as risky to perceiving it as ambiguous. If ambiguity averse, these agents become price-insensitive and no longer influence prices directly. We present the results of an experiment and report that consistent with the theory i) mispricing decreases as the fraction of price-sensitive agents increases, and ii) price-insensitive agents trade to more balanced portfolios.