This paper formalizes the idea that more hedging instruments may destabilize markets when traders are heterogeneous and adapt their behavior according to experience based reinforcement learning. We investigate three different economic settings, a simple mean-variance asset pricing model, a...

Traditional finance is built on the rationality paradigm. This chapter discusses simple models from an alternative approach in which financial markets are viewed as complex evolutionary systems. Agents are boundedly rational and base their investment decisions upon market forecasting heuristics....

This article presents a bifurcation theory of smooth stochastic dynamical systems that are governed by everywhere positive transition densities. The local dependence structure of the unique strictly stationary evolution of such a system can be expressed by the ratio of joint and marginal...

This article presents an equivalence notion of finite order stochastic processes. Local dependence measures are defined in terms of joint and marginal densities. The dependence measures are classified topologically using level sets. The corresponding bifurcation theory is illustrated with some...

We analyze how the threat of a potential future regime shift affects optimal management. We use a simple general growth model to analyze four cases that involve combinations of stock collapse versus changes in system dynamics, and exogenous versus endogenous probabilities of regime shift. Prior...