Financial markets as adaptive systems

We show, by studying in detail the market prices of options on liquid markets, that the market has empirically corrected the simple, but inadequate Black-Scholes formula to account for two important statistical features of asset fluctuations: "fat tails" and correlations in the scale of fluctuations. These aspects, although not included in the pricing models, are very precisely reflected in the price fixed by the market as a whole. Financial markets thus behave as rather efficient adaptive systems.