Speculative behavior and chaotic asset price dynamics: On the emergence of a bandcount accretion bifurcation structure.

We study a simple financial market model with interacting chartists and fundamentalists that may give rise to multiband chaotic attractors. In particular, asset prices fluctuate erratically around their fundamental values, displaying a significant bull and bear market behavior. An in-depth analytical and numerical study of our model furthermore reveals the emergence of a new bifurcation structure, a phenomenon that we call a bandcount accretion bifurcation structure. The latter consists of regions associated with chaotic dynamics only, the boundaries of which are not defined by homoclinic bifurcations, but mainly by contact bifurcations of particular type where two distinct critical points of certain ranks coincide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]