A market is described by two correlated asset prices. But only one of them is traded while the contingent claim is a function of both assets. We solve the mean-variance hedging prob- lem completely and prove that the optimal strategy consists of a modified pure hedge expressible in terms of the...

The optimal control problem is considered for linear stochastic systems with a singular cost. A new uniformly convex structure is formulated, and its consequences on the existence and uniqueness of optimal controls and on the uniform convexity of the value function are proved. In particular, the...

The following backward stochastic Riccati differential equation (BSRDE in short) is motivated, and is then studied. Some properties are presented. The existence and uniqueness of a global adapted solution to a BSRDE has been open for the case D i 6= 0 for more than two decades. Our recent...

We consider the demand for state contingent claims in the presence of a zero-mean, nonhedgeable background risk. An agent is defined to be generalized risk averse if he/she reacts to an increase in background risk by choosing a demand function for contingent claims with a smaller slope. We show...

The existence of an adapted solution to a backward stochastic differential equation which is not adapted to the filtration of the underlying Brownian motion is proved. This result is applied to the pricing of contingent claims. It allows to compare the prices of agents who have different...

We obtain the global existence and uniqueness result for a one-dimensional back- ward stochastic Riccati equation, whose generator contains a quadratic term of L (the second unknown component). This solves the one-dimensional case of Bismut- Peng's problem which was initially proposed by Bismut...

We consider two sequences of Markov chains induc- ing equivalent measures on the discrete path space. We estab- lish conditions under which these two measures converge weakly to measures induced on the Wiener space by weak solutions of two SDEs, which are unique in the sense of probability law....

We review the relations between adjoints of stochastic control problems with the derivative of the value function, and the latter with the value function of a stopping problem. These results are applied to the pricing of contingent claims.

We consider a stochastic volatility model of the mean-reverting type to describe the evolution of a firm’s values instead of the classical approach by Merton with geometric Brownian motions. We develop an analytical expression for the default probability. Our simulation results indicate that...