Present market instabilities have prompted great interest on the characteristics of specific portfolios such as minimum variance and equally- weighted risk contribution portfolios as these portfolios do not rely on the estimate of expected returns. Indeed, in turmoil periods traditional market...

This paper explores the optimisation of asset allocation within “alternative” investments, i.e. between private equity and hedge funds, as well as between private equity and public equities. It uses our proprietary Portfolio Blender tool. As a preliminary step before the optimisation, we...

Volatility is usually considered as a synonym for risk. Mainstream financial theory states that higher portfolio volatility is translated into higher expected returns while diversification helps eliminate idiosyncratic risks. This leaves us with an apparent anomaly as low-risk (low-beta) stocks...

We use minority game model to investigate evolutionary dynamics in complex networks of adaptive agents competing for limited resources. We show that the dynamics and the associated phase structures critically depend on the underlying network organizations, and evolution is a key mechanism for...

This paper looks at a general framework for mean-field games with ambiguity averse players based on the probabilistic framework described in Carmona (2013). A framework for mean-field games with ambiguity averse players is presented, using a version of the stochastic maximum principle to find...

Interbank borrowing and lending may induce systemic risk into financial markets. A simple model of this is to assume that log-monetary reserves are coupled, and that banks can also borrow/lend from/to a central bank. When all banks optimize their cost of borrowing and lending, this leads to a...

If civil war is a contest for popular support, why would a government ever embark on a policy of disproportionate force and mass killing? The logic of civilian defection expects such an approach to easily backfire, as civilians respond to massive losses by opposing the side that inflicted them....

We consider a two-stage serial supply chain with capacity limits, where each installation is operated by managers attempting to minimize their own costs. A multiple-period model is necessitated by the multiple stages, capacity limits, stochastic demand, and the explicit consideration of...

We solve the problem of mean-variance hedging for general semimartingale models via stochastic control methods. After proving that the value process of the associated stochastic control problem has a quadratic structure, we characterise its three coefficient processes as solutions of...

We investigate the optimal investment problem when the interest rate is stochastic and the investor must pay proportional transaction costs when buying and selling the risky assets. We first consider a portfolio of bonds and transaction costs.We then add a stock to the portfolio, and analyze the...