A3.11 B3.16
(i) Explain briefly what it means to say that a stochastic process is a standard Brownian motion.
Let be a standard Brownian motion and let be real numbers. What condition must and satisfy to ensure that the process is a martingale? Justify your answer carefully.
(ii) At the beginning of each of the years an investor has income , of which he invests a proportion , and consumes the rest during the year. His income at the beginning of the next year is
where are independent positive random variables with finite means and is a constant. He decides on after he has observed both and at the beginning of year , but at that time he does not have any knowledge of the value of , for any . The investor retires in year and consumes his entire income during that year. He wishes to determine the investment policy that maximizes his expected total consumption
Prove that the optimal policy may be expressed in terms of the numbers , where , for , and determine the optimal expected total consumption.