The paper studies the problem of maximizing the expected utility of terminal wealth in the framework of a general incomplete semimartingale model of a financial market. We show that the necessary and sufficient condition on a utility function for the validity of several key assertions of the...

We give a review of classical and recent results on maximization of expected utility for an investor who has the possibility of trading in a financial market. Emphasis will be given to the duality theory related to this convex optimization problem.(...)

We examine the connection between discrete-time models of financial markets and the celebrated Black--Scholes--Merton (BSM) continuous-time model in which ''markets are complete." Suppose that (a) the probability law of a sequence of discrete-time models converges to the law of the BSM model and...