The stochastic goodwill problem

Stochastic control problems related to optimal advertising under uncertainty are considered. In particular, we determine the optimal strategies for the problem of maximizing the utility of goodwill at launch time and minimizing the disutility of a stream of advertising costs that extends until the launch time for some classes of stochastic perturbations of the classical Nerlove-Arrow dynamics. We also consider some generalizations such as problems with constrained budget and with discretionary launching

Nonparametric estimates of pricing functionals

We analyze the empirical performance of several non-parametric estimators of the pricing functional for European options, using historical put and call prices on the S&P500 during the year 2012. Two main families of estimators are considered, obtained by estimating the pricing functional directly, and by estimating the (Black-Scholes) implied volatility surface, respectively. In each case simple estimators based on linear interpolation are constructed, as well as more sophisticated ones based on smoothing kernels, \`a la Nadaraya-Watson. The results based on the analysis of the empirical pricing errors in an extensive out-of-sample study indicate that a simple approach based on the Black-Scholes formula coupled with linear interpolation of the volatility surface outperforms, both in accuracy and computational speed, all other methods

Well-posedness and asymptotic behavior for stochastic reaction-diffusion equations with multiplicative Poisson noise

We establish well-posedness in the mild sense for a class of stochastic semilinear evolution equations with a polynomially growing quasi-monotone nonlinearity and multiplicative Poisson noise. We also study existence and uniqueness of invariant measures for the associated semigroup in the Markovian case. A key role is played by a new maximal inequality for stochastic convolutions in $L_p$ spaces.Comment: Final versio

On uniqueness of mild solutions for dissipative stochastic evolution equations

In the semigroup approach to stochastic evolution equations, the fundamental issue of uniqueness of mild solutions is often "reduced" to the much easier problem of proving uniqueness for strong solutions. This reduction is usually carried out in a formal way, without really justifying why and how one can do that. We provide sufficient conditions for uniqueness of mild solutions to a broad class of semilinear stochastic evolution equations with coefficients satisfying a monotonicity assumption.Comment: 10 page