In this paper I consider a portfolio optimization problem where an agent holds an endowment of stock and is allowed to buy some quantity of a put option on the stock. This basic question (how much insurance to buy?) has been addressed in insurance economics through the literature on rational...

Certain commodity producers face uncertain output and price, but can trade financial derivatives on price. I consider how best to use a put option on price. I introduce the variance surface, which is a data visualization technique that shows the level of variance across a grid of values for the...

Whereas much literature has documented difficulties in making probabilistic inferences, it has also emphasized the importance of task characteristics in determining judgmental accuracy. Noting that people exhibit remarkable efficiency in encoding frequency information sequentially, we construct...

This paper explores how a put option changes the probability distribution of portfolio value. The paper extends the model introduced in Bell (2014) by allowing both the quantity and strike price to vary. I use the 5% quantile from the portfolio distribution to measure riskiness and compare...

Abstract: Robust optimization (RO) is a young and active research field that has been mainly developed in the last 15 years. RO techniques are very useful for practice and not difficult to understand for practitioners. It is therefore remarkable that real-life applications of RO are still...

Abstract: Adjustable robust optimization (ARO) is a technique to solve dynamic (multistage) optimization problems. In ARO, the decision in each stage is a function of the information accumulated from the previous periods on the values of the uncertain parameters. This information, however, is...

This paper studies a Monte Carlo algorithm for computing distributions of state variables when the underlying model is a Markov process. It is shown that the L1 error of the estimator always converges to zero with probability one, and often at a parametric rate. A related technique for computing...