NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES ASSET PRICES WHEN AGENTS ARE MARKED-TO-MARKET Gary B. Gorton Ping He Lixin Huang Working Paper 12075 http://www.nber.org/papers/w12075 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 March 2006 We thank Michael Brennan and Charlie Kahn for helpful comments and useful suggestions. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. ©2006 by Gary B. Gorton, Ping He and Lixin Huang. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Asset Prices When Agents are Marked-to-Market Gary B. Gorton, Ping He and Lixin Huang NBER Working Paper No. 12075 March 2006 JEL No. ABSTRACT "Risk management" in securities markets refers to the oversight of portfolio managers and professional traders when they trade on behalf of investors in security markets. Monitoring of their trading performance, profit and loss, and risk-taking behavior, is measured by principals using security market prices. We study the optimality of the practice of marking-to-market and provide conditions under which investing principals should optimally monitor their agent traders using market prices to measure traders' performance. Asset prices, however, can be affected by mark-tomarket contracts. We show that such contracts introduce an externality when there are many traders. Traders may rationally herd, trading on irrelevant information. Ironically, this causes asset prices to be less informative than they would be without the mark-to-market feature. 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