Adaptive Markets

A new, evolutionary explanation of markets and investor behaviorHalf of all Americans have money in the stock market, yet economists can’t agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe. The debate is one of the biggest in economics, and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hangs on the answer. In this groundbreaking book, Andrew Lo transforms the debate with a powerful new framework in which rationality and irrationality coexist—the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency is incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo’s new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought—a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation. An ambitious new answer to fundamental questions about economics and investing, Adaptive Markets is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how markets really work.

"Winner of the 2018 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences, Association of American Publishers", "Winner of the 2018 PROSE Award for Business, Finance & Management, Association of American Publishers", "Finalist for the 2017 TIAA Paul A. Samuelson Award, TIAA Institute", "Shortlisted for the 2017 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award", "One of the CNBC 13 Best Business Books of 2017"

Andrew W. Lo is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering. He is the author of Hedge Funds and the coauthor of A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street (both Princeton), among other books.