We develop and implement methods for determining whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for prospect investors. We formulate a new testing procedure for prospect spanning for two nested portfolio sets based on subsampling and...

We obtain minimax lower bounds on the regret for the classical two--armed bandit problem. We provide a finite--sample minimax version of the well--known log "n" asymptotic lower bound of Lai and Robbins. Also, in contrast to the log "n" asymptotic results on the regret, we show that the minimax...

This paper deals with estimating model parameters in graphical models. We reformulate it as an information geometric optimization problem and introduce a natural gradient descent strategy that incorporates additional meta parameters. We show that our approach is a strong alternative to the...

To create their rankings, university-ranking agencies usually combine multiple performance measures into a composite index. However, both rankings and index scores are sensitive to the weights assigned to performance measures. This paper uses a stochastic dominance efficiency methodology to...

The mean-variance portfolio optimization theory of Markowitz assumes that stock returns are distributed according to normal probability density functions (pdfs). In reality, stock returns are more accurately described by leptokurtic pdfs which have kurtosis greater than zero. Stocks with...

Much of the trading activity in Equity markets is directed to brokerage houses. In exchange they provide so-called quot;soft dollarsquot; which basically are amounts spent in quot;researchquot; for identifying profitable trading opportunities. Soft dollars represent about USD 1 out of every USD...

We develop a practical and novel method for inference on intersection bounds, namely bounds defined by either the infimum or supremum of a parametric or nonparametric function, or equivalently, the value of a linear programming problem with a potentially infinite constraint set. Our approach is...

We develop a practical and novel method for inference on intersection bounds, namely bounds defined by either the infimum or supremum of a parametric or nonparametric function, or equivalently, the value of a linear programming problem with a potentially infinite constraint set. We show that...

Using properties of the cdf of a random variable defined as a saddle-type point of a real valued continuous stochastic process, we derive first-order asymptotic properties of tests for stochastic spanning w.r.t. a stochastic dominance relation. First, we define the concept of Markowitz...