{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,24]],"date-time":"2026-10-24T11:37:52Z","timestamp":1792841872008,"version":"4.5.0"},"posted":{"date-parts":[[2026]]},"group-title":"SSRN","reference-count":0,"publisher":"Elsevier BV","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,1]],"date-time":"2026-01-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1767225600000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"abstract":"<jats:p>We study how traders\u2019 use of AI affects financial markets in a rational expectations model with asymmetric information. Traders process financial data relying on their analytical skills and\/or AI, and we posit that AI delegation causes skills to depreciate over time. We derive an equilibrium where traders use both AI and skill-based information processing. The cheaper AI is, the more it substitutes for cognitive effort and, below a cost threshold, it leads to a decline in expertise. We show that traders delegate to AI even if they rationally account for the implied cognitive decay. Nevertheless, price informativeness is invariant to a decay in expertise, provided that AI remains available. Aggregate price informativeness can therefore hide an underlying erosion of human expertise. This apparent stability is fragile: unexpected AI outages lead to less informative prices relative to an economy where AI was never available. Hence, AI adoption supports informational efficiency but erodes the human expertise that helps markets remain resilient.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.2139\/ssrn.7661969","type":"posted-content","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,24]],"date-time":"2026-10-24T11:11:59Z","timestamp":1792840319000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Traders on GPT:&amp;nbsp;AI and Cognitive Capital in Financial Markets"],"prefix":"10.2139","author":[{"given":"Andrea","family":"Barbon","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8517-0022","authenticated-orcid":true,"given":"Fay\u00e7al","family":"Drissi","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"78","container-title":[],"original-title":[],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,10,24]],"date-time":"2026-10-24T11:11:59Z","timestamp":1792840319000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.ssrn.com\/abstract=7661969"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026]]},"references-count":0,"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.2139\/ssrn.7661969","relation":{},"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026]]},"subtype":"preprint"}}