Reputation and Cycles

We model the interaction between investment firms and a syndicate of investors (i.e., a market) through a dynamic strategic setting. In this setting, the market's assessment of the firms' performance, based on past and current returns, govern the firms' fund-flows incentives. In return, the firms strategically produce excess returns to balance their reputation and payoffs accordingly. Through a unified model we are able to explain much of the well-documented phenomenons of the delegated portfolio-managers problem, including persistent and non-persistent short- and long-term performance. Our model is robust and applies to a wide-range of economic settings where agents are subjected to reputation-based incentives.

Joint work with David Lagziel