arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Walter Schachermayer.
Every submartingale S of class D has a unique Doob-Meyer decomposition S=M+A, where M is a martingale and A is a predictable increasing process starting at 0. We provide a short and elementary prove of the Doob-Meyer decomposition theorem. Several previously known arguments are included to keep the paper self-contained.
The paper is accompanying "A general Duality Theorem for the Monge-Kantorovich Transport Problem". We explain the methods used in this article in an elementary setting and present two examples complementing the results obtained therein.
We consider the maximization of the long-term growth rate in the Black-Scholes model under proportional transaction costs as in Taksar, Klass and Assaf [Math. Oper. Res. 13, 1988]. Similarly as in Kallsen and Muhle-Karbe [Ann. Appl. Probab., 20, 2010] for optimal consumption over an infinite horizon, we tackle this problem by determining a shadow price, which is the solution of the dual problem. It can be calculated explicitly up to determining the root of a deterministic function. This in turn allows to explicitly compute fractional Taylor expansions, both for the no-trade region of the optimal strategy and for the optimal growth rate.
The duality theory of the Monge--Kantorovich transport problem is analyzed in a general setting. The spaces $X, Y$ are assumed to be polish and equipped with Borel probability measures $μ$ and $ν$. The transport cost function $c:X\times Y \to [0,\infty]$ is assumed to be Borel. Our main result states that in this setting there is no duality gap, provided the optimal transport problem is formulated in a suitably relaxed way. The relaxed transport problem is defined as the limiting cost of the partial transport of masses $1-\varepsilon$ from $(X,μ)$ to $(Y, ν)$, as $\varepsilon >0$ tends to zero. The classical duality theorems of H.\ Kellerer, where $c$ is lower semi-continuous or uniformly bounded, quickly follow from these general results.
The dual attainment of the Monge--Kantorovich transport problem is analyzed in a general setting. The spaces $X, Y$ are assumed to be polish and equipped with Borel probability measures $μ$ and $ν$. The transport cost function $c:\XY \to [0,\infty]$ is assumed to be Borel measurable. We show that a dual optimizer always exists, provided we interpret it as a projective limit of certain finitely additive measures. Our methods are functional analytic and rely on Fenchel's perturbation technique.
We give an elementary proof of the celebrated Bichteler-Dellacherie Theorem which states that the class of stochastic processes $S$ allowing for a useful integration theory consists precisely of those processes which can be written in the form $S=M+A$, where $M$ is a local martingale and $A$ is a finite variation process. In other words, $S$ is a good integrator if and only if it is a semi-martingale. We obtain this decomposition rather directly from an elementary discrete-time Doob-Meyer decomposition. By passing to convex combinations we obtain a direct construction of the continuous time decomposition, which then yields the desired decomposition. As a by-product of our proof we obtain a characterization of semi-martingales in terms of a variant of \emph{no free lunch}, thus extending a result from [DeSc94].
We show that stochastically continuous, time-homogeneous affine processes on the canonical state space $\Rplus^m \times \RR^n$ are always regular. In the paper of \citet{Duffie2003} regularity was used as a crucial basic assumption. It was left open whether this regularity condition is automatically satisfied, for stochastically continuous affine processes. We now show that the regularity assumption is indeed superfluous, since regularity follows from stochastic continuity and the exponentially affine behavior of the characteristic function. For the proof we combine classic results on the differentiability of transformation semigroups with the method of the moving frame which has been recently found to be useful in the theory of SPDEs.
In this article we consider a Brownian motion with drift of the form \[dS_t=μ_t dt+dB_t\qquadfor t\ge0,\] with a specific nontrivial $(μ_t)_{t\geq0}$, predictable with respect to $\mathbb{F}^B$, the natural filtration of the Brownian motion $B=(B_t)_{t\ge0}$. We construct a process $H=(H_t)_{t\ge0}$, also predictable with respect to $\mathbb{F}^B$, such that $((H\cdot S)_t)_{t\ge 0}$ is a Brownian motion in its own filtration. Furthermore, for any $δ>0$, we refine this construction such that the drift $(μ_t)_{t\ge0}$ only takes values in $]μ-δ,μ+δ[$, for fixed $μ>0$.
The paper is accompanying "A general Duality Theorem for the Monge-Kantorovich Transport Problem". We explain the methods used in this article in an elementary setting and present two examples complementing the results obtained therein.
We consider the Monge-Kantorovich transport problem in a purely measure theoretic setting, i.e. without imposing continuity assumptions on the cost function. It is known that transport plans which are concentrated on c-monotone sets are optimal, provided the cost function c is either lower semi-continuous and finite, or continuous and may possibly attain the value infty. We show that this is true in a more general setting, in particular for merely Borel measurable cost functions provided that {c=infty} is the union of a closed set and a negligible set. In a previous paper Schachermayer and Teichmann considered strongly c-monotone transport plans and proved that every strongly c-monotone transport plan is optimal. We establish that transport plans are strongly c-monotone if and only if they satisfy a "better" notion of optimality called robust optimality.
We consider the Monge-Kantorovich transport problem in an abstract measure theoretic setting. Our main result states that duality holds if $c:X\times Y\to [0,\infty)$ is an arbitrary Borel measurable cost function on the product of Polish spaces $X,Y$. In the course of the proof we show how to relate a non - optimal transport plan to the optimal transport costs via a ``subsidy'' function and how to identify the dual optimizer. We also provide some examples showing the limitations of the duality relations.
In markets with transaction costs, consistent price systems play the same role as martingale measures in frictionless markets. We prove that if a continuous price process has conditional full support, then it admits consistent price systems for arbitrarily small transaction costs. This result applies to a large class of Markovian and non-Markovian models, including geometric fractional Brownian motion. Using the constructed price systems, we show, under very general assumptions, the following ``face-lifting'' result: the asymptotic superreplication price of a European contingent claim $g(S_T)$ equals $\hat{g}(S_0)$, where $\hat{g}$ is the concave envelope of $g$ and $S_t$ is the price of the asset at time $t$. This theorem generalizes similar results obtained for diffusion processes to processes with conditional full support.
We prove that $c$-cyclically monotone transport plans $π$ optimize the Monge-Kantorovich transportation problem under an additional measurability condition. This measurability condition is always satisfied for finitely valued, lower semi-continuous cost functions. In particular, this yields a positive answer to Problem 2.25 in C. Villani's book. We emphasize that we do not need any regularity conditions as were imposed in the previous literature.
We compare the option pricing formulas of Louis Bachelier and Black-Merton-Scholes and observe -- theoretically as well as for Bachelier's original data -- that the prices coincide very well. We illustrate Louis Bachelier's efforts to obtain applicable formulas for option pricing in pre-computer time. Furthermore we explain -- by simple methods from chaos expansion -- why Bachelier's model yields good short-time approximations of prices and volatilities.
The Mutual Fund Theorem (MFT) is considered in a general semimartingale financial market S with a finite time horizon T, where agents maximize expected utility of terminal wealth. It is established that: 1) Let N be the wealth process of the numéraire portfolio (i.e. the optimal portfolio for the log utility). If any path-independent option with maturity T written on the numéraire portfolio can be replicated by trading \emph{only} in N, then the (MFT) holds true for general utility functions, and the numéraire portfolio may serve as mutual fund. This generalizes Merton's classical result on Black-Scholes markets. Conversely, under a supplementary weak completeness assumption, we show that the validity of the (MFT) for general utility functions implies the same replicability property for options on the numéraire portfolio described above. 2) If for a given class of utility functions (i.e. investors) the (MFT) holds true in all complete Brownian financial markets S, then all investors use the same utility function U, which must be of HARA type. This is a result in the spirit of the classical work by Cass and Stiglitz.
We give an easy counter-example to Problem 7.20 from C. Villani's book on mass transport: in general, the quadratic Wasserstein distance between $n$-fold normalized convolutions of two given measures fails to decrease monotonically.
For a given element $f\in L^1$ and a convex cone $C\subset L^\infty$, $C\cap L^\infty_+=\{0\}$ we give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an element $g\ge f$ lying in the polar of $C$. This polar is taken in $(L^\infty)^*$ and in $L^1$. In the context of mathematical finance the main result concerns the existence of martingale measures, whose densities are bounded from below by prescribed random variable.
We provide a representation of the (signed) BMV-measure by stochastic means and prove positivity of the respective measures in dimension $d=3$ in several non-trivial cases by combinatorial methods.