On the super replication price of unbounded claims

In an incomplete market the price of a claim f in general cannot be uniquely identified by no arbitrage arguments. However, the ``classical'' super replication price is a sensible indicator of the (maximum selling) value of the claim. When f satisfies certain pointwise conditions (e.g., f is bounded from below), the super replication price is equal to sup_QE_Q[f], where Q varies on the whole set of pricing measures. Unfortunately, this price is often too high: a typical situation is here discussed in the examples. We thus define the less expensive weak super replication price and we relax the requirements on f by asking just for ``enough'' integrability conditions. By building up a proper duality theory, we show its economic meaning and its relation with the investor's preferences. Indeed, it turns out that the weak super replication price of f coincides with sup_{Q\in M_{\Phi}}E_Q[f], where M_{\Phi} is the class of pricing measures with finite generalized entropy (i.e., E[\Phi (\frac{dQ}{dP})]<\infty) and where \Phi is the convex conjugate of the utility function of the investor.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051604000000459 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A unified framework for utility maximization problems: An Orlicz space approach

We consider a stochastic financial incomplete market where the price processes are described by a vector-valued semimartingale that is possibly nonlocally bounded. We face the classical problem of utility maximization from terminal wealth, with utility functions that are finite-valued over $(a,\infty)$, $a\in\lbrack-\infty,\infty)$, and satisfy weak regularity assumptions. We adopt a class of trading strategies that allows for stochastic integrals that are not necessarily bounded from below. The embedding of the utility maximization problem in Orlicz spaces permits us to formulate the problem in a unified way for both the cases $a\in\mathbb{R}$ and $a=-\infty$. By duality methods, we prove the existence of solutions to the primal and dual problems and show that a singular component in the pricing functionals may also occur with utility functions finite on the entire real line.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AAP469 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Family Problems. Debates over Coupling, Marriage, and Family within the Italian Lesbian Community, 1990s

In the European context, Italy is currently an anomaly. It has no legislative instrument with which to regulate same sex relationship , despite the fact that in the last twenty-five years the Italian LGBTIQ movement (at least in its mainstream manifestation) has continued to call for a law on the subject (civil partnerships, regulation of de facto cohabitation, PACS, and marriage, are a handful of the solutions that have been proposed). In the political elaboration of certain radical sectors of the movement there has been an attempt to critique, or at least question, the imaginaries produced by the investment in the gay family. There has never been a stage of the Italian LGBTIQ movement in which positions regarding the concept of the family were homogeneous. Instead often it was precisely regarding this issue that the radical or reformist dialectic contrasted

Reduced-form framework under model uncertainty

In this paper we introduce a sublinear conditional expectation with respect to a family of possibly nondominated probability measures on a progressively enlarged filtration. In this way, we extend the classic reduced-form setting for credit and insurance markets to the case under model uncertainty, when we consider a family of priors possibly mutually singular to each other. Furthermore, we study the superhedging approach in continuous time for payment streams under model uncertainty, and establish several equivalent versions of dynamic robust superhedging duality. These results close the gap between robust framework for financial market, which is recently studied in an intensive way, and the one for credit and insurance markets, which is limited in the present literature only to some very specific cases