We propose an approach to the valuation of payoffs in general semimartingale models of financial markets where prices are nonnegative. Each asset price can hit 0; we only exclude that this ever happens simultaneously for all assets. We start from two simple, economically motivated axioms, namely...

In a numéraire-independent framework, we study a financial market with N assets which are all treated in a symmetric way. We define the fundamental value *S of an asset S as its superreplication price and say that the market has a strong bubble if *S and S deviate from each other. None of these...

Let X be a continuous adapted process for which there exists an equivalent local martingale measure (ELMM). The minimal martingale measure P is the unique ELMM for X with the property that local P-martingales strongly orthogonal to the P-martingale part of X are also local P-martingales. We...

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...