Kirman's ant model has been used to characterize the expectation formation of financial investors who are prone to herding. The model's original version suffers from the problem of N-dependence: its ability to replicate the statistical features of financial returns vanishes once the system size...

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different,possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patternssimultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decisionmaking. In this paper we present a simple...