Consumption and Portfolio Policies With Incomplete Markets and Short-Sale Constraints: the Finite-Dimensional Case

We use a martingale approach to study optimal intertemporal consumption and portfolio policies in a general discrete-time, discrete-state-space securities market with dynamically incomplete markets and short-sale constraints. We characterize the set of feasible consumption bundles as the budget-feasible set defined by constraints formed using the extreme points of the closure of the set of Arrow-Debreu state prices consistent with no arbitrage, and then establish a relationship between the original problem and a dual minimization problem. Copyright 1991 Blackwell Publishers.