Millo / Spence / Valentine Inertia

Purposeful Inefficiencies in Financial Markets
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-231-55927-0
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 248 Seiten

Winner, 2025 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Financial professionals are paid as if they were capable of “beating the market” on a regular basis. In fact, active fund managers routinely underperform low-cost index funds, and financial analysts frequently produce inaccurate stock recommendations—and many receive large fees even when their clients are losing money. Why do financial intermediaries still persist in the investing world despite this track record? Economic theory, obsessed with notions of market efficiency, has no good answer.

This book demonstrates how long-standing social relationships within the investing world contribute to a state of inertia, which prevents substantive change to the status quo. In financial markets—as in many other settings—social groups persist through habit, routine, and path dependency. Financial intermediaries, for their part, use their positions to maintain and reproduce a state of affairs from which they benefit. Although financial professionals portray their world as one of dynamism and continuous innovation, in reality a strategic and purposeful inertia often prevails. An incisive sociological analysis of the communities that constitute financial markets, Inertia offers new insight into the social structures and dynamics that shape economic action.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Millo, Yuval

Spence, Crawford

Valentine, James J.

Fachgebiete

• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Finanzsektor & Finanzdienstleistungen Finanzsektor & Finanzdienstleistungen: Allgemeines
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Financial Intermediaries
2. Social Structures of Financial Markets
3. Social Stickiness
4. Conformity and Consensus
5. Technological Resistance
6. The Big Doxic Disturbance
7. Distinction Work
Conclusion: Purposeful Inertia in Financial Markets
Methodological Appendix: Speaking to the Prophets of Alpha
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Yuval Millo is professor of accounting at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick.

Crawford Spence is professor of accounting and codirector of the FinWork Futures Research Centre at King’s College London.

James J. Valentine is the founder of AnalystSolutions and previously served as director of the Applied Investment Management program at Marquette University.