This paper gives an overview of results and developments in the area of pricing and hedging contingent claims in an incomplete market by means of a quadratic criterion. We first present the approach of risk-minimization in the case where the underlying discounted price process X is a local...

We propose a simplified approach to mean-variance portfolio problems by changingtheir parametrisation from trading strategies to final positions. This allows us to treat,under a very mild no-arbitrage-type assumption, a whole range of quadratic optimisationproblems by simple mathematical tools...

The Markowitz problem consists of finding in a financial market a self-financingtrading strategy whose final wealth has maximal mean and minimal variance. Westudy this in continuous time in a general semimartingale model and under coneconstraints: Trading strategies must take values in a...

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

We study mean-variance hedging under portfolio constraints in a general semi-martingale model. The constraints are formulated via predictable correspondences,meaning that the trading strategy is restricted to lie in a closed convex set whichmay depend on the state and time in a predictable way....