We introduce a model of dyadic social interactions and establish its correspondence with relational models theory (RMT), a theory of human social relationships. RMT posits four elementary models of relationships governing human interactions, singly or in combination: Communal Sharing, Authority...

We study the optimal design of a menu of funds by a manager who is required to use linear pricing and does not observe the preferences of investors regarding one of the risky assets. The optimal menu involves bundling of assets and can be explicitly constructed from the solution to a calculus of...

Risk transfer is a key risk and capital management tool for insurance companies. Transferring risk between insurers is used to mitigate risk and manage capital re- quirements. We investigate risk transfer in the context of a network environment of insurers and consider capital costs and capital...

We construct portfolios with an alternative selection criterion, the Omega function, which can be expressed as the ratio of two partial moments of the returns distribution. Finding Omega-optimal portfolios, in particular under realistic constraints like cardinality restrictions, requires to...

In modern portfolio theory, financial portfolios are characterised by a desired property, the 'reward', and something undesirable, the 'risk'. While these properties are commonly identified with mean and variance of returns, respectively, we test alternative specifications like partial and...

This chapter gives an overview of current research in evolutionary finance. We mainly focus on the survival and stability properties of investment strategies associated with the Kelly rule. Our approach to the study of the wealth dynamics of investment strategies is inspired by Darwinian ideas...

Hedge funds offer desirable risk-return profiles; but we also find high management fees, lack of transparency and worse, very limited liquidity (they are often closed to new investors and disinvestment fees can be prohibitive). This creates an incentive to replicate the attractive features of...

We develop statistical methods to detect informed trading in options markets. We apply these methods to 31 companies from various sectors over 14 years analyzing approximately 9.6 million option prices. We find that option informed trading tends to cluster prior to certain events, takes place...

This appendix extends the empirical results in Chesney, Crameri, and Mancini (2011). Informed trading activities on put and call options are analyzed for 19 companies in the banking and insurance sectors from January 1996 to September 2009. Our empirical findings suggest that certain events such...

Consider an investor trading dynamically to maximize expected utility from terminal wealth. Our aim is to study the dependence between her risk aversion and the distribution of the optimal terminal payoff . Economic intuition suggests that high risk aversion leads to a rather concentrated...