Microeconomic theory of financial markets under volatility uncertainty

Beißner P. Microeconomic theory of financial markets under volatility uncertainty. Bielefeld: Bielefeld University; 2013

Uncertainty in Engineering

This open access book provides an introduction to uncertainty quantification in engineering. Starting with preliminaries on Bayesian statistics and Monte Carlo methods, followed by material on imprecise probabilities, it then focuses on reliability theory and simulation methods for complex systems. The final two chapters discuss various aspects of aerospace engineering, considering stochastic model updating from an imprecise Bayesian perspective, and uncertainty quantification for aerospace flight modelling. Written by experts in the subject, and based on lectures given at the Second Training School of the European Research and Training Network UTOPIAE (Uncertainty Treatment and Optimization in Aerospace Engineering), which took place at Durham University (United Kingdom) from 2 to 6 July 2018, the book offers an essential resource for students as well as scientists and practitioners

ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

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Robustness and sensitivity of risk evaluations

This thesis is a collection of three contributions to sensitivity analysis of financial and insurance risk evaluations. Sensitivity analysis constitutes an important component of model building, interpretation and validation, particularly for models whose output is at the core of a risk management decision process. We study models comprising a (random) vector of input factors, an aggregation function mapping input factors to a random output, and a risk measure applied to the output. In most typical insurance and financial applications, the model’s characteristic – a non-analytical and numerically expensive aggregation function evaluated on numerous input factors – renders most sensitivity analysis methodologies unfeasible. We develop sensitivity analysis procedures applicable specifically for the above model setting. First, we address the estimation of risk measures applied to the model output. The fundamental purpose of a risk measure is to distinguish between different risk profiles. However, strong assumptions on the risk measure’s ability to distinguish risk severities lead to non robust estimators. We provide conditions when risk measures exhibit both, robustness and a consistent ranking of risks. Second, we develop a framework termed reverse sensitivity testing, that associates a critical increase in the risk measure to specific input factors. We provide analytical solutions of the stressed distribution of input factors that lead to the required increase in the outputs’ risk measure. Third, we introduce a novel sensitivity measure, which quantifies the extent to which the model output is affected by a stress in an individual input factor. Compared to other sensitivity measures in the literature, the proposed measure incorporates the direct impact of the stressed input as well as indirect effects via other input factors that are dependent on the one being stressed. In this way the dependence between inputs is explicitly taken into account

The Target-Based Utility Model. The role of Copulas and of Non-Additive Measures

My studies and my Ph.D. thesis deal with topics that recently emerged in the field of decisions under risk and uncertainty. In particular, I deal with the "target-based approach" to utility theory. A rich literature has been devoted in the last decade to this approach to economic decisions: originally, interest had been focused on the "single-attribute" case and, more recently, extensions to "multi-attribute" case have been studied. This literature is still growing, with a main focus on applied aspects. I will, on the contrary, focus attention on some aspects of theoretical type, related with the multi-attribute case. Various mathematical concepts, such as non-additive measures, aggregation functions, multivariate probability distributions, and notions of stochastic dependence emerge in the formulation and the analysis of target-based models. Notions in the field of non-additive measures and aggregation functions are quite common in the modern economic literature. They have been used to go beyond the classical principle of maximization of expected utility in decision theory. These notions, furthermore, are used in game theory and multi-criteria decision aid. Along my work, on the contrary, I show how non-additive measures and aggregation functions emerge in a natural way in the frame of the target-based approach to classical utility theory, when considering the multi-attribute case. Furthermore they combine with the analysis of multivariate probability distributions and with concepts of stochastic dependence. The concept of copula also constitutes a very important tool for this work, mainly for two purposes. The first one is linked to the analysis of target-based utilities, the other one is in the comparison between classical stochastic order and the concept of "stochastic precedence". This topic finds its application in statistics as well as in the study of Markov Models linked to waiting times to occurrences of words in random sampling of letters from an alphabet. In this work I give a generalization of the concept of stochastic precedence and we discuss its properties on the basis of properties of the connecting copulas of the variables. Along this work I also trace connections to reliability theory, whose aim is studying the lifetime of a system through the analysis of the lifetime of its components. The target-based model finds an application in representing the behavior of the whole system by means of the interaction of its components

Extremal Dependence Concepts

The probabilistic characterization of the relationship between two or more random variables calls for a notion of dependence. Dependence modeling leads to mathematical and statistical challenges, and recent devel- opments in extremal dependence concepts have drawn a lot of attention to probability and its applications in several disciplines. The aim of this paper is to review various concepts of extremal positive and negative dependence, including several recently established results, reconstruct their history, link them to probabilistic optimization problems, and provide a list of open ques- tions in this area. While the concept of extremal positive dependence is agreed upon for random vectors of arbitrary dimensions, various notions of extremal negative dependence arise when more than two random variables are involved. We review existing popular concepts of extremal negative de- pendence given in literature and introduce a novel notion, which in a gen- eral sense includes the existing ones as particular cases. Even if much of the literature on dependence is focused on positive dependence, we show that negative dependence plays an equally important role in the solution of many optimization problems. While the most popular tool used nowadays to model dependence is that of a copula function, in this paper we use the equivalent concept of a set of rearrangements. This is not only for historical reasons. Re- arrangement functions describe the relationship between random variables in a completely deterministic way, allow a deeper understanding of dependence itself, and have several advantages on the approximation of solutions in a broad class of optimization problems

Uncertainty in Engineering

This open access book provides an introduction to uncertainty quantification in engineering. Starting with preliminaries on Bayesian statistics and Monte Carlo methods, followed by material on imprecise probabilities, it then focuses on reliability theory and simulation methods for complex systems. The final two chapters discuss various aspects of aerospace engineering, considering stochastic model updating from an imprecise Bayesian perspective, and uncertainty quantification for aerospace flight modelling. Written by experts in the subject, and based on lectures given at the Second Training School of the European Research and Training Network UTOPIAE (Uncertainty Treatment and Optimization in Aerospace Engineering), which took place at Durham University (United Kingdom) from 2 to 6 July 2018, the book offers an essential resource for students as well as scientists and practitioners

Finanční aplikace podmíněných očekávání

Import 14/02/2017This dissertation examines different financial applications of some conditional expectation estimators. In the first application, we provide some theoretical motivations behind the use of the moving average rule as one of the most popular trading tools among practitioners. In particular, we examine the conditional probability of the price increments and we study how this probability changes over time. In the second application, we present different approaches to evaluate the presence of the arbitrage opportunities in the option market. In particular, we investigate empirically the well-known put-call parity no-arbitrage relation and the state price density. We first measure the violation of the put-call parity as the difference in implied volatilities between call and put options. Furthermore, we propose alternative approaches to estimate the state price density under the classical hypothesis of the Black and Scholes model. In the third application, we investigate the implications for portfolio theory of using conditional expectation estimators. First, we focus on the approximation of the conditional expectation within large-scale portfolio selection problems. In this context, we propose a new consistent multivariate kernel estimator to approximate the conditional expectation. We show how the new estimator can be used for the return approximation of large-scale portfolio problems. Moreover, the proposed estimator optimizes the bandwidth selection of kernel type estimators, solving the classical selection problem. Second, we propose new performance measures based on the conditional expectation that takes into account the heavy tails of the return distributions. Third, we deal with the portfolio selection problem from the point of view of different non-satiable investors, namely risk-averse and risk-seeking investors. In particular, using a well-known ordering classification, we first identify different definitions of returns based on the investors’ preferences. The new definitions of returns are based on the conditional expected value between the random wealth assessed at different times. Finally, for each problem, we propose an empirical application of several admissible portfolio optimization problems using the US stock market.154 - Katedra financívyhově