"The majority of financial academics believe in market efficiency and the majority of computer scientists believe that P ≠ NP. The result of this paper is that they cannot both be right: either P = NP and the markets are efficient, or P ≠ NP and the markets are not efficient."
I'll hazard a guess the computer scientists are right, but most financial academics will probably get by just fine if markets are approximately efficient - if prices can be estimated in probabilistic polynomial time.
My amateur understanding is that most academics get that it's a simplifying assumption, but that a lot of other people treat it as a guarantee. It's sort of like people who learn a little about evolution and then conclude that a) we are the most highly evolved organism on the planet, and b) we are therefore perfect.
> a) we are the most highly evolved organism on the planet
I know little about evolution and assume that bacteria are the most evolved because they have a faster cycle of reproduction, and stronger selective pressure.
> My amateur understanding is that most academics get that it's a simplifying assumption, but that a lot of other people treat it as a guarantee.
Most practitioners do understand that it is a simplifying assumption, and then ignore that fact, just as most engineers ignore quantum and relativity effects when calculating the required size of beams. The difference between the better and the simpler models is big enough to cause problems in economics.
>I know little about evolution and assume that bacteria are the most evolved because they have a faster cycle of reproduction, and stronger selective pressure.
That you know what selective pressure means probably puts you in the top couple of percentiles for evolution knowledge. The whole world is emphatically not like Hacker News.
I'll hazard a guess the computer scientists are right, but most financial academics will probably get by just fine if markets are approximately efficient - if prices can be estimated in probabilistic polynomial time.