Framing immunity -- What can immunity do? -- Immunological narratives -- The popularisation of immunology -- Immunity and digital media -- Immune selves -- Fragile immunitary economies -- Immunity and its discontents.

An instalment option is a European option in which the premium, instead of being paid up-front, is paid in a series of instalments. If all instalments are paid the holder receives the exercise value, but the holder has the right to terminate payments on any payment date, in which case the option...

Abstract This paper concerns sequential computation of risk measures for financial data and asks how, given a risk measurement procedure, we can tell whether the answers it produces are ‘correct’. We draw the distinction between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ risk measures and concentrate...

Robert Merton opened a new chapter in finance with his two papers (Merton, 1969; Merton, 1971), reprinted in his book (Merton, 1992), on dynamic asset allocation. Aside from taking a decisive step away from Markowitz-style single-period models, these papers made the key link with stochastic control...

In this chapter, we consider the situation of an investor who manages a portfolio of assets partly funded by an external liability. This is the typical case for banks, insurance companies and hedge funds. Asset and liabilitymanagement (ALM) problems have generated a substantial literature and a...

The problem we have considered so far relates to the finite horizon criterion $$J_{RS}^\theta (t;\,x,\,h)\,: = \, - {1 \over \theta }\ln {\Bbb E}{e^{ - \theta F(t;\,x,\,h)}}$$. There is also a rich literature on risk-sensitive control problems set over an infinite horizon, including Bielecki and...

The objective of this chapter is to illustrate how some of the models developed in the first part of the book can be useful to address practical investment management questions. We consider four short cases. The first one explores the interest of including a factor X(t) compared to the...