Mathematical Finance最新文献

This paper investigates the moral hazard problem in finite horizon with both continuous and lump-sum payments, involving a time-inconsistent sophisticated agent and a standard utility maximizer principal: Building upon the so-called dynamic programming approach in Cvitanić et al. (2018) and the recently available results in Hernández and Possamaï (2023), we present a methodology that covers the previous contracting problem. Our main contribution consists of a characterization of the moral hazard problem faced by the principal. In particular, it shows that under relatively mild technical conditions on the data of the problem, the supremum of the principal's expected utility over a smaller restricted family of contracts is equal to the supremum over all feasible contracts. Nevertheless, this characterization yields, as far as we know, a novel class of control problems that involve the control of a forward Volterra equation via Volterra-type controls, and infinite-dimensional stochastic target constraints. Despite the inherent challenges associated with such a problem, we study the solution under three different specifications of utility functions for both the agent and the principal, and draw qualitative implications from the form of the optimal contract. The general case remains the subject of future research. We illustrate some of our results in the context of a project selection contracting problem between an investor and a time-inconsistent manager.

In this paper, we develop the theory of functional generation of portfolios in an equity market with changing dimension. By introducing dimensional jumps in the market, as well as jumps in stock capitalization between the dimensional jumps, we construct different types of self-financing stock portfolios (additive, multiplicative, and rank-based) in a very general setting. Our study explains how a dimensional change caused by a listing or delisting event of a stock, and unexpected shocks in the market, affect portfolio return. We also provide empirical analyses of some classical portfolios, quantifying the impact of dimensional change in portfolio performance relative to the market.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been extremely successful in generating samples, from seemingly high-dimensional probability measures. However, these methods struggle to capture the temporal dependence of joint probability distributions induced by time-series data. Furthermore, long time-series data streams hugely increase the dimension of the target space, which may render generative modeling infeasible. To overcome these challenges, motivated by the autoregressive models in econometric, we are interested in the conditional distribution of future time series given the past information. We propose the generic conditional Sig-WGAN framework by integrating Wasserstein-GANs (WGANs) with mathematically principled and efficient path feature extraction called the signature of a path. The signature of a path is a graded sequence of statistics that provides a universal description for a stream of data, and its expected value characterizes the law of the time-series model. In particular, we develop the conditional Sig-$�W_1$ metric that captures the conditional joint law of time series models and use it as a discriminator. The signature feature space enables the explicit representation of the proposed discriminators, which alleviates the need for expensive training. We validate our method on both synthetic and empirical dataset and observe that our method consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks with respect to measures of similarity and predictive ability.

In a complete market, we find optimal portfolios for an investor whose satisfaction stems from both a payoff's intrinsic utility and its comparison with an endogenous reference as modeled by Kőszegi and Rabin. In the regular regime, arising when reference dependence is low, the marginal utility of the optimal payoff is proportional to a twist of the pricing kernel. High reference dependence leads to the anchors regime, whereby investors reduce disappointment by concentrating significant probability in one or few fixed outcomes, or “anchors.” Multiple equilibria arise because anchors may not be unique. If stocks follow geometric Brownian motion, the model implies that investors with longer horizons choose larger stocks holdings.

Modern portfolio theory has provided for decades the main framework for optimizing portfolios. Because of its sensitivity to small changes in input parameters, especially expected returns, the mean–variance framework proposed by Markowitz in 1952 has, however, been challenged by new construction methods that are purely based on risk. Among risk-based methods, the most popular ones are Minimum Variance, Maximum Diversification, and Risk Budgeting (especially Equal Risk Contribution) portfolios. Despite some drawbacks, Risk Budgeting is particularly attracting because of its versatility: based on Euler's homogeneous function theorem, it can indeed be used with a wide range of risk measures. This paper presents mathematical results regarding the existence and the uniqueness of Risk Budgeting portfolios for a very wide spectrum of risk measures and shows that, for many of them, computing the weights of Risk Budgeting portfolios only requires a standard stochastic algorithm.

This paper studies the well-posedness of a class of nonlocal fully nonlinear parabolic systems, which nest the equilibrium Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) systems that characterize the time-consistent Nash equilibrium point of a stochastic differential game (SDG) with time-inconsistent (TIC) preferences. The nonlocality of the parabolic systems stems from the flow feature (controlled by an external temporal parameter) of the systems. This paper proves the existence and uniqueness results as well as the stability analysis for the solutions to such systems. We first obtain the results for the linear cases for an arbitrary time horizon and then extend them to the quasilinear and fully nonlinear cases under some suitable conditions. Two examples of TIC SDG are provided to illustrate financial applications with global solvability. Moreover, with the well-posedness results, we establish a general multidimensional Feynman–Kac formula in the presence of nonlocality (time inconsistency).

We study a game between liquidity provider (LP) and liquidity taker agents interacting in an over-the-counter market, for which the typical example is foreign exchange. We show how a suitable design of parameterized families of reward functions coupled with shared policy learning constitutes an efficient solution to this problem. By playing against each other, our deep-reinforcement-learning-driven agents learn emergent behaviors relative to a wide spectrum of objectives encompassing profit-and-loss, optimal execution, and market share. In particular, we find that LPs naturally learn to balance hedging and skewing, where skewing refers to setting their buy and sell prices asymmetrically as a function of their inventory. We further introduce a novel RL-based calibration algorithm, which we found performed well at imposing constraints on the game equilibrium. On the theoretical side, we are able to show convergence rates for our multi-agent policy gradient algorithm under a transitivity assumption, closely related to generalized ordinal potential games.

This paper studies an equity market of stochastic dimension, where the number of assets fluctuates over time. In such a market, we develop the fundamental theorem of asset pricing, which provides the equivalence of the following statements: (i) there exists a supermartingale numéraire portfolio; (ii) each dissected market, which is of a fixed dimension between dimensional jumps, has locally finite growth; (iii) there is no arbitrage of the first kind; (iv) there exists a local martingale deflator; (v) the market is viable. We also present the optional decomposition theorem, which characterizes a given nonnegative process as the wealth process of some investment-consumption strategy. Furthermore, similar results still hold in an open market embedded in the entire market of stochastic dimension, where investors can only invest in a fixed number of large capitalization stocks. These results are developed in an equity market model where the price process is given by a piecewise continuous semimartingale of stochastic dimension. Without the continuity assumption on the price process, we present similar results but without explicit characterization of the numéraire portfolio.