Bernard de Meyer (Ecole d'Economie de Paris)

When two asymmetrically informed risk-neutral agents repeatedly exchange a risky asset for numéraire, they are essentially playing an n-times repeated zero-sum game of incomplete information. In this setting, the price L^q at period q can be defined as the expected liquidation value of the risky asset given players’ past moves. This paper indicates that the asymptotics of this price process at equilibrium, as n goes to infinity, is completely independent of the “natural” trading mechanism used at each round: it converges, as n increases, to a Continuous Martingale of Maximal Variation. This martingale class thus provides natural dynamics that could be used in financial econometrics. It contains in particular Black and Scholes’ dynamics. We also prove here a mathematical theorem on the asymptotics of martingales of maximal M-variation, extending Mertens and Zamir’s paper on the maximal L^1-variation of a bounded martingale.