In the basic Markowitz and Merton models, a stock's weight in efficient portfolios goes up if its expected rate of return goes up. Put differently, there are no financial Giffen goods. By an example from mortgage choice we illustrate that for more complicated portfolio problems Giffen effects do...

We derive no-arbitrage bounds for expected excess returns to generate scenarios used in financial applications. The bounds allow to distinguish three regions: one where arbitrage opportunities will never exist, a second where arbitrage may be present, and a third, where arbitrage opportunities...

No-arbitrage interest rate models are designed to be consistent with the current term structure of interest rates. The diffusion of the interest rates is often approximated with a tree, in which the scenario-dependent fair price of any security is calculated as the present value of the...

Many numerical optimization methods use scenario trees as a discrete approximation for the true (multi-dimensional) probability distributions of the problem's random variables. Realistic specifications in financial optimization models can lead to tree sizes that quickly become computationally...