Pricing News and No News with Heterogeneous Beliefs

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Event details

Date 31.03.2026
Hour 12:1513:15
Speaker Brandon Yueyang Han - University of Maryland
Location
UNIL, Extranef, room 126
Category Conferences - Seminars
Event Language English

We study a general-equilibrium economy where a continuum of agents trade stocks and derivatives under heterogeneous beliefs along two dimensions: news intensity and content. When intensity disagreement dominates, implied volatility appears persistent—quiet periods shift wealth toward calm-world believers, compressing risk-neutral tail probabilities and raising prices. When content disagreement dominates, volatility appears mean-reverting—news shift wealth between optimists and pessimists. The information structure of news process matters for the persistence of intensity disagreement: in a Poisson limit, intensity disagreement survives but is eliminated in a Brownian limit. The framework endogenizes implied volatility smirk and U-shaped cross-section of derivative positions across subjective return beliefs.