Liquidity and Asset Prices in Rational Expectations Equilibrium with Ambiguous Information

Abstract

The quality of information in financial asset markets is often hard to estimate. This paper analyzes information transmission in asset markets when agents treat information of unknown quality as ambiguous. We consider a market with risk-averse informed investors, risk-neutral competitive arbitrageurs, and noisy supply of the risky asset, first studied in Vives (1995a,b) with unambiguous information. Ambiguous information gives rise to the possibility of illiquid market where arbitrageurs choose not to trade in a rational expectations equilibrium. When market is illiquid, small informational or supply shocks have relatively large effects on asset prices. We show that trading volume decreases and liquidity risk increases with ambiguity about probability distribution of asset payoffs. High ambiguity may lead to excess volatility of asset prices.