8,012 research outputs found
On joint distributions of the maximum, minimum and terminal value of a continuous uniformly integrable martingale
We study the joint laws of a continuous, uniformly integrable martingale, its
maximum, and its minimum. In particular, we give explicit martingale
inequalities which provide upper and lower bounds on the joint exit
probabilities of a martingale, given its terminal law. Moreover, by
constructing explicit and novel solutions to the Skorokhod embedding problem,
we show that these bounds are tight. Together with previous results of Az\'ema
& Yor, Perkins, Jacka and Cox & Ob{\l}\'oj, this allows us to completely
characterise the upper and lower bounds on all possible exit/no-exit
probabilities, subject to a given terminal law of the martingale. In addition,
we determine some further properties of these bounds, considered as functions
of the maximum and minimum.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures. This is the authors' accepted version of the
paper which will appear in Stochastic Processes and their Application
Classes of Skorokhod Embeddings for the Simple Symmetric Random Walk
The Skorokhod Embedding problem is well understood when the underlying
process is a Brownian motion. We examine the problem when the underlying is the
simple symmetric random walk and when no external randomisation is allowed. We
prove that any measure on Z can be embedded by means of a minimal stopping
time. However, in sharp contrast to the Brownian setting, we show that the set
of measures which can be embedded in a uniformly integrable way is strictly
smaller then the set of centered probability measures: specifically it is a
fractal set which we characterise as an iterated function system. Finally, we
define the natural extension of several known constructions from the Brownian
setting and show that these constructions require us to further restrict the
sets of target laws
Optimal Transport and Skorokhod Embedding
The Skorokhod embedding problem is to represent a given probability as the
distribution of Brownian motion at a chosen stopping time. Over the last 50
years this has become one of the important classical problems in probability
theory and a number of authors have constructed solutions with particular
optimality properties. These constructions employ a variety of techniques
ranging from excursion theory to potential and PDE theory and have been used in
many different branches of pure and applied probability.
We develop a new approach to Skorokhod embedding based on ideas and concepts
from optimal mass transport. In analogy to the celebrated article of Gangbo and
McCann on the geometry of optimal transport, we establish a geometric
characterization of Skorokhod embeddings with desired optimality properties.
This leads to a systematic method to construct optimal embeddings. It allows
us, for the first time, to derive all known optimal Skorokhod embeddings as
special cases of one unified construction and leads to a variety of new
embeddings. While previous constructions typically used particular properties
of Brownian motion, our approach applies to all sufficiently regular Markov
processes.Comment: Substantial revision to improve the readability of the pape
Robust pricing and hedging under trading restrictions and the emergence of local martingale models
We consider the pricing of derivatives in a setting with trading
restrictions, but without any probabilistic assumptions on the underlying
model, in discrete and continuous time. In particular, we assume that European
put or call options are traded at certain maturities, and the forward price
implied by these option prices may be strictly decreasing in time. In discrete
time, when call options are traded, the short-selling restrictions ensure no
arbitrage, and we show that classical duality holds between the smallest
super-replication price and the supremum over expectations of the payoff over
all supermartingale measures. More surprisingly in the case where the only
vanilla options are put options, we show that there is a duality gap. Embedding
the discrete time model into a continuous time setup, we make a connection with
(strict) local-martingale models, and derive framework and results often seen
in the literature on financial bubbles. This connection suggests a certain
natural interpretation of many existing results in the literature on financial
bubbles
Model-independent pricing with insider information: a Skorokhod embedding approach
In this paper, we consider the pricing and hedging of a financial derivative
for an insider trader, in a model-independent setting. In particular, we
suppose that the insider wants to act in a way which is independent of any
modelling assumptions, but that she observes market information in the form of
the prices of vanilla call options on the asset. We also assume that both the
insider's information, which takes the form of a set of impossible paths, and
the payoff of the derivative are time-invariant. This setup allows us to adapt
recent work of Beiglboeck, Cox and Huesmann (2016) to prove duality results and
a monotonicity principle, which enables us to determine geometric properties of
the optimal models. Moreover, we show that this setup is powerful, in that we
are able to find analytic and numerical solutions to certain pricing and
hedging problems
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