Arbitrage and deflators in illiquid markets

This paper presents a stochastic model for discrete-time trading in financial markets where trading costs are given by convex cost functions and portfolios are constrained by convex sets. The model does not assume the existence of a cash account/numeraire. In addition to classical frictionless markets and markets with transaction costs or bid-ask spreads, our framework covers markets with nonlinear illiquidity effects for large instantaneous trades. In the presence of nonlinearities, the classical notion of arbitrage turns out to have two equally meaningful generalizations, a marginal and a scalable one. We study their relations to state price deflators by analyzing two auxiliary market models describing the local and global behavior of the cost functions and constraints

On an Optional Semimartingale Decomposition and the Existence of a Deflator in an Enlarged Filtration

International audienceGiven a reference filtration F, we consider the cases where an enlarged filtration G is constructed from F in two different ways: progressively with a random time or initially with a random variable. In both situations, under suitable conditions, we present a G-optional semimartingale decomposition for F-local martingales. Our study is then applied to answer the question of how an arbitrage-free semimartingale model is affected when stopped at the random time in the case of progressive enlargement or when the random variable used for initial enlargement satisfies Jacod's hypothesis. More precisely, we focus on the No-Unbounded-Profit-with-Bounded-Risk (NUPBR) condition. We provide alternative proofs of some results from [5], with a methodology based on our optional semimartingale decomposition, which reduces significantly the length of the proof