Excellent surveys of recent work in behavioral asset pricing include Hirshleifer (2001) and Barberis and Thaler (2003). In this paper, we do not attempt to be either as balanced or as comprehensive as these authors. Rather, we adopt the role of advocates, and argue in favor of one particular class of heterogeneous-agent models, which we call “disagreement” models. This category is fairly broad, encompassing work that has focused on the following underlying mechanisms: i) gradual information flow; ii) limited attention; and iii) heterogeneous priors. While these three mechanisms each have their own distinct features,.
