General Equilibrium and Endogenous Creation of Asset Markets

Abstract

This paper studies a class of general equilibrium economies in which asset markets arise as choice of financial intermediaries. The economy is modeled as a two stage game as in Bisin[8]. In the first stage intermediaries set up the financial structure according to the expectation that they have for the second stage outcome. In the second stage, consumers behave as price takers in the commodity market and in the previously created assets market. We consider that intermediaries form their expectations using continuous random selections from the second stage equilibrium correspondence (differently from Bisin[8] where an endogenous beliefs expectation was used). We establish the existence of equilibria in mixed strategies and moreover, we obtain an approximate equilibria in pure strategies by modeling explicitly the incomplete information that each intermediary has about others intermediaries fixed cost functions.

Keywords: Endogenous asset creation, asset design game, strategic intermediaries, continuous random selections, purfication of equilibria

JEL Classification: G20, D51