Structured financial products have gained more and more popularity in recent years, but nevertheless has their success so far notthoroughly been analyzed. In this article we develop a theoreticalframework for the design of optimal structured products and analyzethe maximal utility gain for an...

o obtain the maximum benefits from diversification, financial theory suggests that investors should invest internationally because of the larger potential for risk reduction. The question that we raise in this paper is how to select the optimal portfolio of countries? This article synthesizes...

The paper shows that financial market equilibria need not exist if agents possess cumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. The reason is an infiniteshort-selling problem. But even when a short-sell constraint is added, non-existence can occur due to...

This paper uses a new approach to determine the fraction of truly skilled managers among the universe of U.S. domestic-equity mutual funds over the 1975 to 2006 period. We develop a simple technique that properly accounts for “false discoveries,” or mutual funds which exhibit significant...

The paper rst shows that nancial market equilibria need not to exist if agents possesscumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. This is due tothe boundary behavior of the cumulative prospect theory value function, which might causean innite short-selling...

We study the influence of systematic probability misestimation on complexfinancial investment decisions on the context of structured financialproducts. Structured products have in recent years become more and morecomplex. We study the question whether this complexity might be a...