ETD

• Agent-Based Model
• Artificial Stock Market
• Financial Bubbles
• Heterogeneous Agents
• Market Selection

Mainstream economic theory is hardly capable to explain some of the stylised facts that are normally observed in actual financial time series. Rather, phenomena like volatility clustering and excess comovement of prices have been successfully investigated in frameworks featuring heterogeneous agents and bounded rationality. Our model inherits some of the assumptions common to the Heterogeneous Agents stream of research, and develops an Agent-Based numerical simulation able to study the whole transitional price dynamics of the risky security, and the evolution of portfolio choices and wealth distribution among the traders. Adopting this methodology, we are able to show the emergence of transient bubble-and-bust dynamics, intended as sharp decoupling of the asset price from underlying fundamentals, and to replicate recent findings in financial literature about the asymptotic wealth dominance of the least-risk-averse trader, under quite general assumptions.