Arrow-Debreu Meets Kyle: Price Discovery Across Derivatives

Abstract

We study price discovery in a model where an informed agent has arbitrary private information about state probabilities and trades state-contingent claims. The model unifies the key elements of Arrow-Debreu (1954) and Kyle (1985). When the claims are options, the informed agent has arbitrary information about the underlying asset's payoff distribution and trades option portfolios. Our setting provides the first equilibrium framework that encompasses longs-tanding option-market practices and regularities, including common trading strategies and the volatility smile across strikes.