This paper studies a variant of the contest model introduced by Seel and Strack. In the Seel-Strack contest, each agent or contestant privately observes a Brownian motion, absorbed at zero, and chooses when to stop it. The winner of the contest is the contestant who stops at the highest value....

In this article, we consider the optimal investment-consumption problem for an agent with preferences governed by Epstein-Zin stochastic differential utility who invests in a constant-parameter Black-Scholes-Merton market.The paper has three main goals: first, to provide a detailed introduction...

In this article we consider the infinite-horizon Merton investment-consumption problem in a constant-parameter Black-Scholes-Merton market for an agent with constant relative risk aversion R. The classical primal approach is to write down a candidate value function and to use a verification...

A variance swap is a derivative with a path-dependent payoff which allows investors to take positions on the future variability of an asset. In the idealised setting of a continuously monitored variance swap written on an asset with continuous paths, it is well known that the variance swap...

We pursue an inverse approach to utility theory and associated consumption and investment problems. Instead of specifying a utility function and deriving the actions of an agent, we assume that we observe the actions of the agent (i.e. consumption and investment strategies) and ask if it is...

Let (Wt)0[less-than-or-equals, slant]t[less-than-or-equals, slant]1 be a Brownian Bridge. Then, as shown by Donati-Martin, Matsumoto and Yor, the following identity holds:We give an elegant direct proof of this result, based on an identification between a Brownian bridge and a Brownian excursion...

This paper studies symmetries between fixed and floating-strike Asian options and exploits this symmetry to derive an upper bound for the price of a floating-strike Asian. This bound only involves fixed-strike Asians and vanillas, and can be computed simply given one of the many efficient...

Let Xϕ denote the trading wealth generated using a strategy ϕ, and let CT be a contingent claim which is not spanned by the traded assets. Consider the problem of finding the strategy which maximizes the probability of terminal wealth meeting or exceeding the claim value at some fixed time...