Stock Markets, Beauty Contests, and John Maynard Keynes

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Dear Professor DeLong, Having visited your web pages on Keynes, I just wondered if you could point me in the right direction regarding the connection between Keynes and beauty contests. I dimly recall that in his writing he mentioned that some activity was akin to such a contest. However, I can't remember where this was written nor in what context (or am I totally wrong?) Any direction in which you could point me would be gratefully received. Thanks,

Peter Dixon

-- Peter Dixon (Peter.Dixon@CommerzbankIB.com), September 01, 2000

Answers

The General Theory page 154-156:

"It might have been supposed that competition between expert professionals, possessing judgement and knowledge beyond that of the average private investor, would correct the vagaries of the ignorant individual left to himself. It happens, however, that the energies and skill of the professional investor and speculator are mainly occupied otherwise. For most of these persons are, in fact, largely concerned, not with making superior long-term forecasts of the probable yield of an investment over its whole life, but with foreseeing changes in the conventional basis of valuation a short time ahead of the general public. They are concerned, not with what an investment is really worth to a man who buys it for keeps, but with what the market will value it at, under the influence of mass psychology three months or a year hence.

[...]

Or, to change the metaphor slightly, professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not the faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

If the reader interjects that there must surely be large profits to be gained from the other players in the long run by a skilled individual who, undeterred by the prevailing pastime, continues to purchase investments on the best genuine long-term expectations he can frame, he must be answered, first of all, that there are indeed such serious-minded individuals and that it makes a vast difference to an investment market whether or not they predominate in their influence over the game-players. But we must also add that there are several factors which jeopardise the predominance of such individuals in modern investment markets. Investment based on genuine long-term expectation is so difficult to-day as to be scarcely practicable."

-- Alex Castaldo (acastaldo@att.net), September 01, 2000.


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