Paper 3, Section II, I
Consider a market with two assets, a riskless bond and a risky stock, both of whose initial (time-0) prices are . At time 1 , the price of the bond is a constant and the price of the stock is uniformly distributed on the interval where is a constant.
Describe the set of state price densities.
Consider a contingent claim whose payout at time 1 is given by . Use the fundamental theorem of asset pricing to show that, if there is no arbitrage, the initial price of the claim is larger than and smaller than .
Now consider an investor with initial wealth , and assume . The investor's goal is to maximize his expected utility of time-1 wealth , where . Show that the optimal number of shares of stock to hold is .
What would be the investor's marginal utility price of the contingent claim described above?