2013 Theses Doctoral

On optimal arbitrage under constraints

Sadhukhan, Subhankar

In this thesis, we investigate the existence of relative arbitrage opportunities in a Markovian model of a financial market, which consists of a bond and stocks, whose prices evolve like Itô processes. We consider markets where investors are constrained to choose from among a restricted set of investment strategies. We show that the upper hedging price of (i.e. the minimum amount of wealth needed to superreplicate) a given contingent claim in a constrained market can be expressed as the supremum of the fair price of the given contingent claim under certain unconstrained auxiliary Markovian markets. Under suitable assumptions, we further characterize the upper hedging price as viscosity solution to certain variational inequalities. We, then, use this viscosity solution characterization to study how the imposition of stricter constraints on the market affect the upper hedging price. In particular, if relative arbitrage opportunities exist with respect to a given strategy, we study how stricter constraints can make such arbitrage opportunities disappear.