Persistence of Bounded Rationality in Financial Markets: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Model
Cheng Zhang
Abstract
Classical theory predicts that irrational traders lose money to rational traders and are eventually driven out of the market. Yet noise trading, herding, and heuristic trading persist even in highly developed markets. We model a financial market as an ecology of two trading-behavior types, relatively rational (R) and boundedly rational (N), whose composition evolves under replicator dynamics according to relative performance. Each type's fitness depends on the share of the other type and on frictions. When the interaction is complementary, that is, rational traders profit from the mispricing created by boundedly rational traders while the latter benefit from the liquidity and price correction supplied by the former, and when the difference in frictions is moderate, a unique interior composition exists and is globally asymptotically stable: bounded rationality persists endogenously. When the interaction is antagonistic, the same point becomes a tipping threshold between two one-type regimes. Comparative statics show that lowering the costs of disciplined trading, as algorithmic and AI-based trading does, shifts the composition toward rational trading continuously but does not eliminate bounded rationality unless the cost advantage exceeds an explicit threshold.
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