We propose an approach to the valuation of payoffs in general semimartingale models of financial markets where prices are nonnegative. Each asset price can hit 0; we only exclude that this ever happens simultaneously for all assets. We start from two simple, economically motivated axioms, namely...

In a numéraire-independent framework, we study a financial market with N assets which are all treated in a symmetric way. We define the fundamental value *S of an asset S as its superreplication price and say that the market has a strong bubble if *S and S deviate from each other. None of these...

A classic paper of Borwein/Lewis (1991) studies optimisation problems over L^p_+ with finitely many linear equality constraints, given by scalar products with functions from L^q. One key result shows that if some x in L^p_+ satisfies the constraints and if the constraint functions are...

A P-sigma-martingale density for a given stochastic process S is a local P-martingale Z0 starting at 1 such that the product ZS is a P-sigma-martingale. Existence of a P-sigma-martingale density is equivalent to a classic absence-of-arbitrage property of S, and it is invariant if we replace the...