Strategies of Survival in Dynamic Asset Market Games

Abstract

The paper examines a game-theoretic evolutionary model of a financial market with endogenous equilibrium asset prices. Assets pay dividends that are partially consumed and partially reinvested. The traders use general, adaptive strategies (portfolio rules), distributing their wealth between assets, depending on the exogenous states of the world and the observed history of the game. The main goal is to identify strategies, allowing an investor to survive, i.e. to possess a positive, bounded away from zero, share of market over the whole infinite time horizon. This work brings together recent studies on evolutionary finance with the classical topic of non-cooperative market games.

Keywords: evolutionary finance, dynamic games, stochastic games, survival strategies

JEL Classification: C73, D52, G11