Consensus Consumer and Intertemporal Asset Pricing with Heterogeneous Beliefs

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of heterogeneous beliefs in an otherwise standard competitive complete market economy. The construction of a consensus probability belief, as well as a consensus consumer, is shown to be valid modulo an aggregation bias, which takes the form of a discount factor. In classical cases, the consensus probability belief is a risk tolerance weighted average of the individual beliefs, and the discount factor is proportional to beliefs dispersion. This discount factor makes the heterogeneous beliefs setting fundamentally different from the homogeneous beliefs setting, and it is consistent with the interpretation of beliefs heterogeneity as a source of risk. Copyright 2007 The Review of Economic Studies Limited.