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...

Contemporary financial stochastic programs typically involve a trade-offbetween return and (downside)-risk. Using stochastic programming we characterize analytically (rather than numerically) the optimal decisions that follow from characteristic single-stage and multi-stage versions of such...

This study develops a portfolio optimization method based on the Stochastic Dominance (SD) decision criterion and the Empirical Likelihood (EL) estimation method. SD and EL share a distribution-free assumption framework which allows for dynamic and non-Gaussian multivariate return distributions....

If a given risky prospect is compared with multiple choice alternatives, then a joint test for optimality is more appropriate than a series of pairwise Stochastic Dominance tests. We develop and implement a bootstrap empirical likelihood ratio test for this hypothesis. The test statistic and...

A framework is developed for portfolio optimization with higher-order Stochastic Dominance constraints. A finite system of restrictions on the lower partial moments can be used for evaluating the efficiency of a given benchmark and for constructing enhanced portfolios which dominate the...

We develop an optimization method for constructing investment portfolios that dominate a given benchmark index in terms of third-degree stochastic dominance. Our approach relies on the properties of the semivariance function, a refinement of an existing ‘super-convex' dominance condition and...

A stochastic bound is a portfolio which stochastically dominates all alternatives in a reference portfolio set instead of a single alternative portfolio. An approximate bound is a portfolio which comes as close as possible to this ideal. To identify and analyze exact or approximate bounds,...

An optimization method is developed for constructing investment portfolios which stochastically dominate a given benchmark for all decreasing absolute risk-averse investors, using Quadratic Programming. The method is applied to standard data sets of historical returns of equity price reversal...

Concepts are introduced for analyzing arbitrage portfolios in the face of ambiguity about investor risk preferences and initial portfolio holdings. A Stochastic Arbitrage Opportunity is a self-financing overlay portfolio which enhances every feasible host portfolio for all relevant utility...

This paper provides a novel five-component decomposition of optimal dynamic portfolio choice. It reveals the simultaneous impacts from market incompleteness and wealth-dependent utilities. The decomposition leads to implementation via either closed-form solutions or Monte Carlo simulations. With...