We report a surprising link between optimal portfolios generated by a special type of variational preferences called divergence preferences (see Maccheroni et al., 2006) and optimal portfolios generated by classical expected utility. As a special case, we connect optimization of truncated...

This paper explicitly solves, in closed form, the optimal consumption and port folio choice for an ambiguity averse investor in a Merton-type two assets economy where a risk premium follows a mean-reverting process. The investor's preferences are represented by the recursive multiple priors...

While it is common knowledge that portfolio separation in a continuous-time lognormal market is due to the basic properties of the Gaussian distribution, the usual textbook exposition relies on dynamic programming and thus Itô stochastic calculus and the appropriate regularity conditions. This...

This interdisciplinary paper explains how mathematical techniques of stochastic optimal control can be applied to the recent subprime mortgage crisis. Why did the financial markets fail to anticipate the recent debt crisis, despite the large literature in mathematical finance concerning optimal...

We show that the optimal asset allocation for an investor depends crucially on the theory with which the investor is modeled. For the same market data and the same client data different theories lead to different portfolios. The market data we consider is standard asset allocation data. The...

We propose a simplified approach to mean-variance portfolio problems by changing their parametrisation from trading strategies to final positions. This allows us to treat, under a very mild no-arbitrage-type assumption, a whole range of quadratic optimisation problems by simple mathematical...

The two fund separation property of the elliptical distributions is extended to the skew-elliptical and by adding a number of funds equalling the rank of the skewness matrix. Some elements of the generalization to singular extended skew-elliptical distributions are covered. -- Portfolio...

This study develops and implements a theory and method for analyzing whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set for risk averse investors. We develop a test procedure for ‘stochastic spanning’ for two nested polyhedral...

We compare asset allocations that are derived for cumulative prospect theory (CPT) based on two different methods: maximizing CPT along the mean {variance efficient frontier and maximizing CPT without this restriction. We find that with normally distributed returns, the difference between these...