Abstract For any utility function with asymptotic elasticity equal to one, we construct a market model in countable discrete time, such that the utility maximization problem with proportional transaction costs admits no solution. This proves that the necessity of the reasonable asymptotic...

In markets with transaction costs, consistent price systems play the same role as martingale measures in frictionless markets. We prove that if a continuous price process has conditional full support, then it admits consistent price systems for arbitrarily small transaction costs. This result...

For portfolio choice problems with proportional transaction costs, we discuss whether or not there exists a "shadow price", i.e., a least favorable frictionless market extension leading to the same optimal strategy and utility. By means of an explicit counter-example, we show that shadow prices...

When the planning horizon is long, and the safe asset grows indefinitely, isoelastic portfolios are nearly optimal for investors who are close to isoelastic for high wealth, and not too risk averse for low wealth. We prove this result in a general arbitrage-free, frictionless, semimartingale...

Recent progress in portfolio choice has made a wide class of problems involving transaction costs tractable. We review the basic approach to these problems, and outline some directions for future research.

Refining previously known estimates, we give large-strike asymptotics for the implied volatility of Merton's and Kou's jump diffusion models. They are deduced from call price approximations by transfer results of Gao and Lee. For the Merton model, we also analyse the density of the underlying...

We consider the at-the-money strike derivative of implied volatility as the maturity tends to zero. Our main results quantify the growth of the slope for infinite activity exponential Levy models. As auxiliary results, we obtain the limiting values of short maturity digital call options, using...

There are several (mathematical) reasons why Dupire's formula fails in the non-diffusion setting. And yet, in practice, ad-hoc preconditioning of the option data works reasonably well. In this note, we attempt to explain why. In particular, we propose a regularization procedure of the option...

We determine the price of digital double barrier options with an arbitrary number of barrier periods in the Black–Scholes model. This means that the barriers are active during some time intervals, but are switched off in between. As an application, we calculate the value of a structure floor...