We study the size and the existence of the mutual fund industry by generalizing the standard competitive noisy rational expectations framework with endogenous information acquisition. Since informed agents optimally choose to open mutual funds in order to sell their private information, mutual funds are an endogenous feature of our equilibrium. Our model yields novel predictions on price informativeness, optimal fund fees, the equilibrium risk premium,...

This paper studies how relative consumption effects, in which a person's satisfaction with their own consumption depends on how much others are consuming, affect investors' incentives to acquire information. We find that such consumption externalities can generate complementarities in information acquisition within the standard rational expectations paradigm. When agents are sensitive to the wealth of others, they herd on the same information, trying to mimic...

We study information sales in financial markets with strategic risk-averse traders. Our main result establishes that the optimal selling mechanism is one of the following two: (i) sell to as many agents as possible very imprecise information; (ii) sell to a single agent a signal as precise as possible. As noise trading per unit of risk-tolerance becomes large, the "newsletters" or "rumors" associated with (i)...

We study a security design problem under asymmetric information, in the spirit of Myers and Majluf (1984). We introduce a new condition on the right tail of the firm-value distribution that determines the optimality of debt versus equity-like securities. When asymmetric information has a small impact on the right-tail, risky debt is preferred for low capital needs, but convertible debt is optimal for larger capital...

We develop a benchmark model to study the equilibrium consequences of indexing in a standard rational expectations setting. Individuals incur costs to participate in financial markets, and these costs are lower for individuals who restrict themselves to indexing. A decline in indexing costs directly increases the prevalence of index- ing, thereby reducing the price efficiency of the index and augmenting relative price efficiency. In equilibrium,...

This paper considers an optimal contracting problem between an informed risk-averse agent and a principal, when the agent needs to perform multiple tasks, and the principal is active, namely she can influence some aspect of the agency relationship on top of the contract itself (i.e. capital budgets, task assignments). The paper shows how asymmetric information makes incentives and investment decisions substitutes for the principal. This...

We study a novel class of noisy rational expectations equilibria in markets with large number of agents. We show that, as long as noise (liquidity traders, endowment shocks) increases with the number of agents in the economy, the limiting competitive equilibrium is well-defined and leads to non-trivial information acquisition, and partially revealing prices, even if per-capita noise tends to zero. We find that in such...

We study financial markets in which both rational and overconfident agents coexist and make endogenous information acquisition decisions. We demonstrate the following irrelevance result: when a positive fraction of rational agents (endogenously) decides to become informed in equilibrium, prices are set as if all investors were rational, and as a consequence the overconfidence bias does not affect informational efficiency, price volatility, rational traders' expected profits...