The scale and terms of aggregate borrowing in an economy depend on the manner in which wealth is distributed across potential creditors with heterogeneous beliefs about the future. This distribution evolves over time as uncertainty is resolved, in favor of optimists if loans are repaid in full,...

We examine the effects of speculation using credit derivatives on the cost of debt and the likelihood of default. The availability of credit default swaps induces investors who are optimistic about borrower revenues to sell protection instead of buying bonds. This benefits borrowers if...

We consider the properties of a cost function based automated market maker aggregating the beliefs of risk-averse traders with finite budgets. Individuals can interact with the market maker an arbitrary number of times before the state of the world is revealed. We show that the resulting...

Consider a group of individuals with unobservable perspectives (subjective prior beliefs) about a sequence of states. In each period, each individual receives private information about the current state and forms an opinion (a posterior belief). She also chooses a target individual and observes...