Related papers: Elasticity theory of structuring
Quantitative structuring is a rigorous framework for the design of financial products. We show how it incorporates traditional investment ideas while supporting a more accurate expression of clients' views. We touch upon adjacent topics…
Quality-designed consumer products are easy to recognize. Wouldn't it be great if the quality of financial products became just as apparent? This paper is addressed to financial practitioners. It provides an informal introduction to…
The recent crisis and the following flight to simplicity put most derivative businesses around the world under considerable pressure. We argue that the traditional modeling techniques must be extended to include product design. We propose a…
Financial and gambling markets are ostensibly similar and hence strategies from one could potentially be applied to the other. Financial markets have been extensively studied, resulting in numerous theorems and models, while gambling…
What is the demand elasticity of statistical arbitrageurs that invest according to the advice of modern cross-sectional asset pricing models? Thirteen models from the literature exhibit strikingly inelastic demand, in contrast to classical…
This article is a prologue to the article "Why Markets are Inefficient: A Gambling 'Theory' of Financial Markets for Practitioners and Theorists." It presents important background for that article --- why gambling is important, even…
The expected utility hypothesis is a popular concept in economics that is useful for making decisions when the payoff is uncertain. In this paper, we investigate the implications of a fluctuation theorem in the theory of expected utility.…
Many casinos routinely use mechanical card shuffling machines. We were asked to evaluate a new product, a shelf shuffler. This leads to new probability, new combinatorics and to some practical advice which was adopted by the manufacturer.…
Probability forecasts are intended to account for the uncertainties inherent in forecasting. It is suggested that from an end-user's point of view probability is not necessarily sufficient to reflect uncertainties that are not simply the…
The option is a financial derivative, which is regularly employed in reducing the risk of its underlying securities. However, investing in option is still risky. Such risk becomes much severer for speculators who utilize option as a means…
Gambles are random variables that model possible changes in monetary wealth. Classic decision theory transforms money into utility through a utility function and defines the value of a gamble as the expectation value of utility changes.…
A deterministic trading strategy by a representative investor on a single market asset, which generates complex and realistic returns with its first four moments similar to the empirical values of European stock indices, is used to simulate…
A common assumption in financial engineering is that the market price for any derivative coincides with an objectively defined risk-neutral price - a plausible assumption only if traders collectively possess objective knowledge about the…
Inspired by the theory of desirable gambles that is used to model uncertainty in the field of imprecise probabilities, I present a theory of desirable things. Its aim is to model a subject's beliefs about which things are desirable. What…
The instability of the financial system as experienced in recent years and in previous periods is often linked to credit defaults, i.e., to the failure of obligors to make promised payments. Given the large number of credit contracts, this…
This paper examines the relationship between casino rules, players' gambling strategies, and their expected returns, and derives the formula about the players' expected return.
We contrast Arbitrage Pricing Theory (APT), the theoretical basis for the development of financial instruments, with a dynamical picture of an interacting market, in a simple setting. The proliferation of financial instruments apparently…
Estimating and controlling large risks has become one of the main concern of financial institutions. This requires the development of adequate statistical models and theoretical tools (which go beyond the traditionnal theories based on…
Choice functions constitute a simple, direct and very general mathematical framework for modelling choice under uncertainty. In particular, they are able to represent the set-valued choices that typically arise from applying decision rules…
I study the limit of a large random economy, where a set of consumers invests in financial instruments engineered by banks, in order to optimize their future consumption. This exercise shows that, even in the ideal case of perfect…