Sticky Continuous Processes have Consistent Price Systems

The paper studies connections between arbitrage and utility maximization in a discrete-time financial market. The market is incomplete. Thus one has several choices of equivalent martingale measures to price contingent claims. Davis determines a unique price for a contingent claim which is based on an optimal dynamic portfolio by use of a `marginal rate of substitution' argument. Here conditions will be given such that this price is determined by a martingale measure and thus by a consistent price system. The underlying utility function U is defined on the positive half-line. Then dynamic portfolios are admissible if the terminal wealth is positive. In case of the logarithmic utility function, the optimal dynamic portfolio is the numeraire portfolio.

We now return to general continuous-time financial market models in the setting of §6.1, i.e. there are d+1 primary traded assets whose price processes are given by stochastic processes S 0,... , S d , which are assumed to be adapted, right-continuous with left-limits (RCLL) and strictly positive semimartin-gales on a filtered probability space (Ω, F ℙ, F) (as usual F = (F t ) t≤T ). We assume that the market is free of arbitrage, in the sense that there exist equivalent martingale measures, but it contains non-attainable contingent claims, i.e. there are cash flows which cannot be replicated by self-financing trading strategies. In view of Theorem 6.1.5 this means that we do not have a unique equivalent martingale measures. We try to answer the obvious questions in this setting: how should we price the non-attainable contingent claims, i.e. which of the possible equivalent martingale measures should we pick for our valuation formula based on expectation, and, how can we construct hedging strategies for the nonattainable contingent claims to ‘minimise the risk? We try to answer these two questions in the general setting and then consider a prominent example of an incomplete market, a market with stochastic volatility, in more detail.KeywordsTrading StrategyStochastic VolatilityContingent ClaimMartingale MeasureIncomplete MarketThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

We provide a fundamental theorem of asset pricing and a superhedging theorem for a model independent discrete time financial market with proportional transaction costs. We consider a probability-free version of the robust no arbitrage condition introduced by Schachermayer in [Math. Finance, 14 (2004), pp. 19--48] and show that this is equivalent to the existence of consistent price systems. Moreover, we prove that the superhedging price for a claim g coincides with the frictionless superhedging price of g for a suitable process in the bid-ask spread.

The fundamental theory of asset pricing has been developed under the two main assumptions that markets are frictionless and have no arbitrage opportunities. In this case the market enforces that replicable assets are valued by a linear function of their payoffs, or as the discounted expectation with respect to the so-called risk-neutral probability. Important evidence of the presence of frictions in financial markets has led to study market pricing rules in such a framework. Recently, Cerreia-Vioglio et al. (J Econ Theory 157:730–762, 2015) have extended the Fundamental Theorem of Finance by showing that, with markets frictions, requiring the put–call parity to hold, together with the mild assumption of translation invariance, is equivalent to the market pricing rule being represented as a discounted Choquet expectation with respect to a risk-neutral nonadditive probability. This paper continues this study by characterizing important properties of the (unique) risk-neutral nonadditive probability v_f associated with a Choquet pricing rule f, when it is not assumed to be subadditive. First, we show that the observed violation of the call–put parity, a condition considered by Chateauneuf et al. (Math Financ 6:323–330, 1996) similar to the put–call parity in Cerreia-Vioglio et al. (2015), is consistent with the existence of bid-ask spreads. Second, the balancedness of v_f—or equivalently the non-vacuity of its core—is characterized by an arbitrage-free condition that eliminates all the arbitrage opportunities that can be obtained by splitting payoffs in parts; moreover the (nonempty) core of v_f consists of additive probabilities below v_f whose associated (standard) expectations are all below the Choquet pricing rule f. Third, by strengthening again the previous arbitrage-free condition, we show the existence of a strictly positive risk-neutral probability below v_f, which allows to recover the standard formulation of the Fundamental Theorem of Finance for frictionless markets.

This paper studies the market viability with proportional transaction costs. Instead of requiring the existence of strictly consistent price systems as in the literature, we show that strictly consistent local martingale systems (SCLMS) can successfully serve as the dual elements such that the market viability can be verified. We introduce two weaker notions of no arbitrage conditions on market models named no unbounded profit with bounded risk (NUPBR) and no local arbitrage with bounded portfolios (NLABPs). In particular, we show that the NUPBR and NLABP conditions in the robust sense are equivalent to the existence of SCLMS for general market models. We also discuss the implications for the utility maximization problem.

We prove a version of the fundamental theorem of asset pricing (FTAP) in continuous time that is based on the strict no‐arbitrage condition and that is applicable to both frictionless markets and markets with proportional transaction costs. We consider a market with a single risky asset whose ask price process is higher than or equal to its bid price process. Neither the concatenation property of the set of wealth processes, that is used in the proof of the frictionless FTAP, nor some boundedness property of the trading volume of admissible strategies usually argued within models with a nonvanishing bid–ask spread need to be satisfied in our model.

In this paper, we examine the dependence of option prices in a general jump-diffusion model on the choice of martingale pricing measure. Since the model is incomplete, there are many equivalent martingale measures. Each of these measures corresponds to a choice for the market price of diffusion risk and the market price of jump risk. Our main result is to show that for convex payoffs, the option price is increasing in the jump-risk parameter. We apply this result to deduce general inequalities, comparing the prices of contingent claims under various martingale measures, which have been proposed in the literature as candidate pricing measures. Our proofs are based on couplings of stochastic processes. If there is only one possible jump size then we are able to utilize a second coupling to extend our results to include stochastic jump intensities.

It is proven, under a set of assumptions differing from the usual ones in the unboundedness of the time interval, that, in an economy in equilibrium consisting of a risk‐free cash account and an equity whose price process is a geometric Brownian motion on [0, ∞), the drift rate must be close to the risk‐free rate; if the drift rate μ and the risk‐free rate r are constants, then r = μ and the price process is the same under both empirical and risk neutral measures. Contributing in some degree perhaps to interest in this mathematical curiosity is the fact, based on empirical data taken at various times over an assortment of equities and relatively short durations, that no tests of the hypothesis of equality are rejected.

An agent's optimization problem of the expected terminal wealth utility in a trinomial tree economy is solved. At each transaction date, the agent can trade in a riskless asset, a primitive asset subject to constant proportional transaction costs, and a contingent claim characterized by some parameter kappa whose bid and ask price is defined by allowing for different equivalent martingale measures. In addition to the classical portfolio choice problem, the characteristic of the contingent claim κ is determined endogenously in the optimization problem. Under suitable conditions, it is proved that the optimal demand of the agent in the primitive risky asset is zero independently of the choice of the terminal wealth utility function: the agent prefers not to trade in the asset subject to transaction costs, which prevents the market from being complete, rather than trading in both assets. Next, the optimal choice of the contingent claim is characterized and the results are applied to European call and put options with fixed maturity and varying exercise price κ.

We give a sufficient condition to identify the q-optimal signed and the q-optimal absolutely continuous martingale measures in exponential Levy models. As a consequence, we find that in the one-dimensional case, the q-optimal equivalent martingale measures may exist only if the tails for upward jumps are extraordinarily light. Moreover, we derive the convergence of q-optimal signed, resp. absolutely continuous, martingale measures to the minimal entropy martingale measure as q approaches one. Finally, some implications for portfolio optimization are discussed.

A Primer on Portfolio Choice with Small Transaction Costs

Let χ be a family of stochastic processes on a given filtered probability space (Ω, F, (Ft)t∈T, P) with T⊆R+. Under the assumption that the set Me of equivalent martingale measures for χ is not empty, we give sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique equivalent martingale measure that minimizes the relative entropy, with respect to P, in the class of martingale measures. We then provide the characterization of the density of the minimal entropy martingale measure, which suggests the equivalence between the maximization of expected exponential utility and the minimization of the relative entropy.

The paper studies connections between risk aversion and martingale measures in a discrete‐time incomplete financial market. An investor is considered whose attitude toward risk is specified in terms of the index b of constant proportional risk aversion. Then dynamic portfolios are admissible if the terminal wealth is positive. It is assumed that the return (risk) processes are bounded. Sufficient (and nearly necessary) conditions are given for the existence of an optimal dynamic portfolio which chooses portfolios from the interior of the set of admissible portfolios. This property leads to an equivalent martingale measure defined through the optimal dynamic portfolio and the index 0 < b≤ 1. Moreover, the option pricing formula of Davis is given by this martingale measure. In the case of b= 1; that is, in the case of the log‐utility, the optimal dynamic portfolio defines the numéraire portfolio.

This paper examines how proportional transaction costs, short-sale constraints, and margin requirements affect inferences based on asset return data about intertemporal marginal rates of substitution (IMRSs). It is shown that small transaction costs can greatly reduce the required variability of IMRSs. This suggests that the low variability of many parametric, aggregate consumption based IMRSs need not be inconsistent with asset return data. Euler inequalities for a transaction cost economy with power utility are tested using aggregate consumption data and returns on stocks and short maturity U.S. Treasury bills. In the majority of cases there is little evidence against power utility specifications with low risk-aversion parameters. The results are obtained with transaction costs on stocks as small as .5% of price, and are in sharp contrast to the strong rejection of the analogous Euler equalities for a frictionless economy.

This paper defines an optimization criterion for the set of all martingale measures for an incomplete market model when the discounted price process is bounded and quasi‐left continuous. This criterion is based on the entropy–Hellinger process for a nonnegative Doléans–Dade exponential local martingale. We develop properties of this process and establish its relationship to the relative entropy “distance.” We prove that the martingale measure, minimizing this entropy–Hellinger process, is unique. Furthermore, it exists and is explicitly determined under some mild conditions of integrability and no arbitrage. Different characterizations for this extremal risk‐neutral measure as well as immediate application to the exponential hedging are given. If the discounted price process is continuous, the minimal entropy–Hellinger martingale measure simply is the minimal martingale measure of Föllmer and Schweizer. Finally, the relationship between the minimal entropy–Hellinger martingale measure (MHM) and the minimal entropy martingale measure (MEM) is provided. We also give an example showing that in contrast to the MHM measure, the MEM measure is not robust with respect to stopping.