The analysis of loss data is of utmost interest in many branches of the financial and insurance businesses, in structural engineering and in operations research among others. In the financial industry the determination of the distribution of losses is the first step to take in order to compute...

We present some results of the application of maximum entropy methods to determine the probability density of compound random variables. This problem is very important in the banking and insurance business, but also appears in system reliability and in operations research. The mathematical tool...

The maximum entropy method was originally proposed as a variational technique to determine probability densities from the knowledge of a few expected values. The applications of the method beyond its original role in statistical physics are manifold. An interesting feature of the method is its...

In an arbitrage-free economy with non-zero bid-ask spreads, the presence of payoffs, whose price is lower than the price of another payoff where the former dominates the latter, can not be discarded in general. However, their presence is a true market anomaly when the former price corresponds to...

To analyze the economic significance of pricing errors of stock index options, a system of linear inequalities is developed which completely characterizes all risk arbitrage opportunities which arise if a well-behaved pricing kernel does not exist. The Stochastic Arbitrage system can account for...

In this paper it is shown how the set of all portfolios which are second-order stochastic dominance efficient can be characterized by using a series of mixed-integer linear constrains. Our derivation employs a combination of the first-order conditions of the utility maximization problem together...

We present a generalization of Cochrane and Saá-Requejo's good-deal bounds which allows to include in a flexible way the implications of a given stochastic discount factor model. Furthermore, a useful application to stochastic volatility models of option pricing is provided where closed-form...

Bernardo and Ledoit (2000) develop a very appealing framework to compute pricing bounds based on what they call gain-loss ratio. Their method has many advantages and very interesting properties and so far one important drawback: the complexity of the numerical computation of the pricing bounds....

The expansion of videoconference lectures has raised concerns about the potential harm they could represent for the attention and engagement of college students. By observing the behavior of a large population of participants in an identical flipped course before and after March 2020, levels of...

This paper develops simple measures of engagement and attention which are particularly appealing for active learning. They can be computed at a very low cost with Electronic Response Systems which are wildly available and whose use has substantially increased with the COVID-19-driven shift to...