SFS Cavalcade North America 2026
Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia
May 18-21, 2026
Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 18th Apr 2026, 05:19:24am EDT
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Agenda Overview |
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Track T3-5: Asset Pricing: Theory
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Financial Market Fragility in the Era of AI Planning 1The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania; 2Hong Kong University of Science and Technology This paper examines how AI planning, the core technology behind agentic AI systems that pursue long-horizon objectives by anticipating how current actions shape future payoff-relevant states, affects financial market stability. We develop a dynamic trading framework with positive-feedback investors, constrained arbitrageurs, and oligopolistic informed speculators who may coordinate intertemporally: trading aggressively in tandem to generate (negative) bubbles and subsequently unwinding their positions in a coordinated manner to extract profits. Such intertemporal coordination differs from traditional collusion because it faces two unique, fundamental obstacles: time inconsistency, as coordinated plans become incentive-incompatible once a large (negative) bubble has formed, and weak punishment, as deviations are difficult to penalize when no large (negative) bubble materializes. We characterize equilibria featuring coordinated creation of manipulative, exploitative (negative) bubbles. In simulation experiments, AI speculators trained via reinforcement-learning algorithms with explicit planning modules autonomously discover and implement intertemporal collusive trading strategies based on compounded price-trigger rules, coordinating without communication or shared intent. When feedback trading is strong, these AI-planning speculators dynamically converge on destabilizing strategies that create and exploit (negative) bubbles, manipulate feedback traders, and significantly amplify market fragility.
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