Demand Discovery and Asset Pricing

Abstract
Dynamic trading of long-dated securities exposes investors to resale price risk due to uncertainty about the future asset demands of their trading counter-parties. This paper specifically models trading and asset pricing when investors are asymmetrically informed about each other's preferences. Through a process we call demand discovery, trading reveals private information about counter-parties' preferences and, hence, about the preference-component in future prices. Demand discovery leads to endogenous joint dynamics in prices, trading volume, price volatility, and expected returns. As a result, trading volume and market liquidity are forward-looking proxies for preference risk in future prices. Demand discovery provides an alternative explanation to transaction costs for the empirical relationship between market liquidity and future returns.

This publication has 50 references indexed in Scilit: