Paper 2, Section II, K

Stochastic Financial Models
Part II, 2014

An agent has expected-utility preferences over his possible wealth at time 1 ; that is, the wealth ZZ is preferred to wealth ZZ^{\prime} if and only if EU(Z)EU(Z)E U(Z) \geqslant E U\left(Z^{\prime}\right), where the function U:RRU: \mathbb{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{R} is strictly concave and twice continuously differentiable. The agent can trade in a market, with the time-1 value of his portfolio lying in an affine space A\mathcal{A} of random variables. Assuming cash can be held between time 0 and time 1 , define the agent's time-0 utility indifference price π(Y)\pi(Y) for a contingent claim with time-1 value YY. Assuming any regularity conditions you may require, prove that the map Yπ(Y)Y \mapsto \pi(Y) is concave.

Consider a market with two claims with time-1 values XX and YY. Their joint distribution is

(XY)N((μXμY),(VXXVXYVYXVYY)).\left(\begin{array}{l} X \\ Y \end{array}\right) \sim N\left(\left(\begin{array}{l} \mu_{X} \\ \mu_{Y} \end{array}\right),\left(\begin{array}{ll} V_{X X} & V_{X Y} \\ V_{Y X} & V_{Y Y} \end{array}\right)\right) .

At time 0 , arbitrary quantities of the claim XX can be bought at price pp, but YY is not marketed. Derive an explicit expression for π(Y)\pi(Y) in the case where

U(x)=exp(γx)U(x)=-\exp (-\gamma x)

where γ>0\gamma>0 is a given constant.