Sequential Binary Investment Decisions

Sequential Binary Investment Decisions
Author: Werner Jammernegg
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 364246646X

This book describes some models from the theory of investment which are mainly characterized by three features. Firstly, the decision-maker acts in a dynamic environment. Secondly, the distributions of the random variables are only incompletely known at the beginning of the planning process. This is termed as decision-making under conditions of uncer tainty. Thirdly, in large parts of the work we restrict the analysis to binary decision models. In a binary model, the decision-maker must choose one of two actions. For example, one decision means to undertake the invest ·ment project in a planning period, whereas the other decision prescribes to postpone the project for at least one more period. The analysis of dynamic decision models under conditions of uncertainty is not a very common approach in economics. In this framework the op timal decisions are only obtained by the extensive use of methods from operations research and from statistics. It is the intention to narrow some of the existing gaps in the fields of investment and portfolio analysis in this respect. This is done by combining techniques that have been devel oped in investment theory and portfolio selection, in stochastic dynamic programming, and in Bayesian statistics. The latter field indicates the use of Bayes' theorem for the revision of the probability distributions of the random variables over time.

Portfolio Management under Stress

Portfolio Management under Stress
Author: Riccardo Rebonato
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 456
Release: 2014-01-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107663113

Portfolio Management under Stress offers a novel way to apply the well-established Bayesian-net methodology to the important problem of asset allocation under conditions of market distress or, more generally, when an investor believes that a particular scenario (such as the break-up of the Euro) may occur. Employing a coherent and thorough approach, it provides practical guidance on how best to choose an optimal and stable asset allocation in the presence of user specified scenarios or 'stress conditions'. The authors place causal explanations, rather than association-based measures such as correlations, at the core of their argument, and insights from the theory of choice under ambiguity aversion are invoked to obtain stable allocations results. Step-by-step design guidelines are included to allow readers to grasp the full implementation of the approach, and case studies provide clarification. This insightful book is a key resource for practitioners and research academics in the post-financial crisis world.

A Robust Bayesian Approach to Portfolio Selection

A Robust Bayesian Approach to Portfolio Selection
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This thesis aims at studying the local robustness properties of Bayesian posterior summaries and deriving a robust procedure to estimate Bayesian Mean-Variance weights in a portfolio selection problem. In the first part, we study the local robustness of Bayesian estimators. In particular, we build a framework wherein any Bayesian quantity can be seen as a posterior functional. In this way it becomes possible to construct different robustness measures. We derive local influence measures for posterior summaries with respect both to prior and sampling distributions and to observations. Then we address the issue of efficient implementation of the derived measures through MCMC algorithms. In the second part, we deal with the problem of robust estimation in a Bayesian context, providing a useful result to generalize univariate robust distributions to the multivariate case. We also propose criteria to assess in which cases a robust model is recommended and how to choose among estimates obtained with different distributions. Finally, we consider in the third part the Mean-Variance portfolio selection problem. We provide evidence that if the data are normally distributed the Bayesian approach works better than the Certainty Equivalence approach, nevertheless this is no longer true when the data contain few outlying observations. Moreover, we compute useful measures of sensitivity of Bayesian weights and we construct and implement a new estimator which is robust with respect to the presence of 'extreme' observations.