Alternative Assets and Strategic Allocation: Rethinking the Institutional Approach

CHAPTER 18

Alternative Investments and Information Theory

In keeping with the environmental metaphor that occupied much of the previous chapter, here I turn to Andrew Lo’s (2004) concept of information “ecologies” (23). In contrast to Bookstaber’s idea of liquidity “habitats,” Lo’s notion is defined in terms of competition among different “species” of investors to uncover and react promptly to new information. The use of “promptly” here suggests that there are some respects in which the two strands of analysis intertwine, as does Bookstaber’s account of how relevant certain forms of information are in different liquidity conditions. I will scratch the surface of this commonality between their two notions to some extent below, although it is ...