Replicating portfolios have recently emerged as an important tool in the life insurance industry, used for the valuation of companies' liabilities. This paper presents a replicating portfolio (RP) model for approximating life insurance liabilities as closely as possible. We minimize the L1 error...

In the existing financial literature, entropy based ideas have been proposed in portfolio optimization and in model calibration for options pricing. The abstracted problem corresponds to finding a probability measure that minimizes Kullbach-Leibler (KL) distance with respect to a known measure...

The investment industry lacks an unified framework for handling derivative instruments in general portfolio management. With the increased use of derivatives, there is a need for a framework that aligns fundamental terminology and concepts. The main challenges with the current practices are...

Investors sometimes have strong convictions that a distinctive economic regime will prevail in the period ahead and therefore would like to form a portfolio that reflects the expected returns, standard deviations, and correlations of assets during such a regime. To do so, they typically isolate...

In spite of their importance, third or higher moments of portfolio returns are often neglected in portfolio construction problems due to the computational difficulties associated with them. In this paper, we propose a new robust mean–variance approach that can control portfolio skewness and...

This paper provides a microfounded information acquisition technology based on a simple framework with information search. When searchable information is limited, an agent encounters increasingly more redundant information in his search for new information. Redundancy slows down the learning...

Assuming that probabilities (capacities) of events are random, this paper introduces a novel model of decision making under ambiguity, called Shadow probability theory, a generalization of the Choquet expected utility. In this model, probabilities of observable events in a subordinated...

We posit a fund manager and an individual investor who maximize the expected (log) utility of their respective terminal wealth. The manager possesses more information than the investor does and charges the latter, her would-be customer, a linear compensation fee. The investor will delegate his...

Exact analytical solutions to the problem of computing a minimum semivariance portfolio cannot be obtained due to the endogeneity of the semicovariance matrix. However, when the number of assets is small, the weights for such a portfolio can be determined numerically. This paper presents the R...

A variable annuity (VA) is an equity-linked annuity that provides investment guarantees to its policyholder and its contributions are normally invested in multiple underlying assets (e.g., mutual funds), which exposes VA liability to significant market risks. Hedging the market risks is...