Three centuries of asset pricing

Theory on the pricing of financial assets can be traced back to Bernoulli's famous St Petersburg paper of 1738. Since then, research into asset pricing and derivative valuation has been influenced by a couple of dozen major contributions published during the twentieth century. These seminal works have underpinned the key ideas of mean–variance optimisation, equilibrium analysis and no-arbitrage arguments. This paper presents a historical review of these important contributions to finance.