We study properties of structured financial products optimizing a utility functional of a customer. The conventional method may have the disadvantage that the a priori restriction to a certain number of assets could make it impossible to find the optimal portfolio. So instead of optimizing the...

Prospect Theory is a widely accepted descriptive framework to model decisions under risk. However, it is limited to situations with finitely many outcomes. Moreover, it is discontinuous, i.e., small changes in a lottery can produce large differences in its utility, contrary to experiments. In...

We conduct controlled experiments in order to analyze individual trading behavior. Our results suggest that investors measure their gains relative to their initial wealth, and that this reference point together with past stock price changes determine the portfolio choices. Subjects choose a...

According to the traditional view held in finance returns of assets are determined by complete rationality of decision makers. Rational decisions are defined by a set of axioms that are universal and do not leave room for cultural differences. In this article we show that cultural differences do...

Based on the APARCH model and two outlier detection methods, we computereliable time series of volatility asymmetry for 49 countries with relatively few ob-servations. Results show a steady increase in the asymmetry over the years for mostcountries. We nd that economic development and market...

The paper rst shows that nancial market equilibria need not to exist if agents possesscumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. This is due tothe boundary behavior of the cumulative prospect theory value function, which might causean innite short-selling...

Structured financial products have gained more and more popularity in recent years, but nevertheless has their success so far notthoroughly been analyzed. In this article we develop a theoreticalframework for the design of optimal structured products and analyzethe maximal utility gain for an...

The paper shows that financial market equilibria need not exist if agents possess cumulative prospect theory preferences with piecewise-power value functions. The reason is an infiniteshort-selling problem. But even when a short-sell constraint is added, non-existence can occur due to...

We observe that the standard variant of Prospect Theory cannot describe very risk-averse choices in simple lotteries. This makes it diffcult to accommodate it with experimental data. Using an exponential value function can solve this problem and allows to cover the whole spectrum of risk-averse...

We prove that under very weak conditions optimal financial products have to be co-monotone with the inverted state price density. Optimality is meant in the sense of the maximization of an arbitrary preference model, e.g. Expected Utility Theory or Prospect Theory. The proof is based on methods...