We study the modelling and valuation of surrender and other behavioural options in life insurance and pension. We place ourselves in between the two extremes of completely arbitrary intervention and optimal intervention by the policyholder. We present a method that is based on differential...

We propose a new static parameterization of the implied volatility surface which is constructed by using polynomials of sigmoid functions combined with some other terms. This parameterization is flexible enough to fit market implied volatilities which demonstrate smile or skew. An arbitrage-free...

We determine the optimal strategies for purchasing term life insurance and for investing in a risky financial market in order to maximize the probability of reaching a bequest goal. We extend our previous work, Bayraktar et al. 2014a, Section 3.1, in two important ways: (1) we assume that the...

This paper studies the parabolic free boundary problem arising from pricing American-style put options on an asset whose index follows a geometric Brownian motion process. The contribution is to propose a condition for that the early exercise boundary is a convex function.

In economic and financial networks, the strength of each node has always an important economic meaning, such as the size of supply and demand, import and export, or financial exposure. Constructing null models of networks matching the observed strengths of all nodes is crucial in order to either...

In this paper, we present a unified framework for decision making under uncertainty. Our framework is based on the composite of two risk measures, where the inner risk measure accounts for the risk of decision given the exact distribution of uncertain model parameters, and the outer risk measure...

Credit risk may be warehoused by choice, or because of limited hedging possibilities. Credit risk warehousing increases capital requirements and leaves open risk. Open risk must be priced in the physical measure, rather than the risk neutral measure, and implies profits and losses. Furthermore...

The most commonly accepted model for investors' preferences is expected utility theory. More recently, other theories have emerged and pose new challenges to mathematics. The present paper treats preferences of cumulative prospect theory (CPT), where an "S-shaped" utility function is considered...

We investigate entropy as a financial risk measure. Entropy explains the equity premium of securities and portfolios in a simpler way and, at the same time, with higher explanatory power than the beta parameter of the capital asset pricing model. For asset pricing we define the continuous...

Multi-period measures of risk account for the path that the value of an investment portfolio takes. The most widely used such path-dependent indicator of risk is drawdown, which is a measure of decline from a historical peak in cumulative returns. In the context of probabilistic risk metrics,...