The dual risk model is a popular model in finance and insurance, which is often used to model the wealth process of a venture capital or high tech company. Optimal dividends have been extensively studied in the literature for a dual risk model. It is well known that the value function of this optimal control problem does not yield closed-form solutions except in some special cases. In this paper, we study the asymptotics of the optimal dividend problem when the parameters of the model go to either zero or infinity. Our results provide insights to the optimal strategies and the optimal values when the parameters are extreme.
We consider the general class of spectrally positive Lévy risk processes, which are appropriate for businesses with continuous expenses and lump sum gains whose timing and sizes are stochastic. Motivated by the fact that dividends cannot be paid at any time in real life, we study $\textit{periodic}$ dividend strategies whereby dividend decisions are made according to a separate arrival process. In this paper, we investigate the impact of fixed transaction costs on the optimal periodic dividend strategy, and show that a periodic $(b_u,b_l)$ strategy is optimal when decision times arrive accordi…
We consider an optimal control problem of a property insurance company with proportional reinsurance strategy. The insurance business brings in catastrophe risk, such as earthquake and flood. The catastrophe risk could be partly reduced by reinsurance. The management of the company controls the reinsurance rate and dividend payments process to maximize the expected present value of the dividends before bankruptcy. This is the first time to consider the catastrophe risk in property insurance model, which is more realistic. We establish the solution of the problem by the mixed singular-regular c…
This paper considers nonlinear regular-singular stochastic optimal control of large insurance company. The company controls the reinsurance rate and dividend payout process to maximize the expected present value of the dividend pay-outs until the time of bankruptcy. However, if the optimal dividend barrier is too low to be acceptable, it will make the company result in bankruptcy soon. Moreover, although risk and return should be highly correlated, over-risking is not a good recipe for high return, the supervisors of the company have to impose their preferred risk level and additional charge o…
Based on a point of view that solvency and security are first, this paper considers regular-singular stochastic optimal control problem of a large insurance company facing positive transaction cost asked by reinsurer under solvency constraint. The company controls proportional reinsurance and dividend pay-out policy to maximize the expected present value of the dividend pay-outs until the time of bankruptcy. The paper aims at deriving the optimal retention ratio, dividend payout level, explicit value function of the insurance company via stochastic analysis and PDE methods. The results present…
This paper studies the optimal dividend for a multi-line insurance group, in which each subsidiary runs a product line and is exposed to some external credit risk. The default contagion is considered such that one default event may increase the default probabilities of all surviving subsidiaries. The total dividend problem for the insurance group is investigated and we find that the optimal dividend strategy is still of the barrier type. Furthermore, we show that the optimal barrier of each subsidiary is modulated by the default state. That is, how many and which subsidiaries have defaulted wi…
This paper considers optimal control problem of a large insurance company under a fixed insolvency probability. The company controls proportional reinsurance rate, dividend pay-outs and investing process to maximize the expected present value of the dividend pay-outs until the time of bankruptcy. This paper aims at describing the optimal return function as well as the optimal policy. As a by-product, the paper theoretically sets a risk-based capital standard to ensure the capital requirement of can cover the total risk.
This paper studies a dynamic optimal reinsurance and dividend-payout problem for an insurance company in a finite time horizon. The goal of the company is to maximize the expected cumulative discounted dividend payouts until bankruptcy or maturity which comes earlier. The company is allowed to buy reinsurance contracts dynamically over the whole time horizon to cede its risk exposure with other reinsurance companies. This is a mixed singular-classical control problem and the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation is a variational inequality with a fully nonlinear operator and subject t…
This paper develops numerical methods for finding optimal dividend pay-out and reinsurance policies. A generalized singular control formulation of surplus and discounted payoff function are introduced, where the surplus is modeled by a regime-switching process subject to both regular and singular controls. To approximate the value function and optimal controls, Markov chain approximation techniques are used to construct a discrete-time controlled Markov chain with two components. The proofs of the convergence of the approximation sequence to the surplus process and the value function are given…
American options are financial instruments that can be exercised at any time before expiration. In this paper we study the problem of pricing this kind of derivatives within a framework in which some of the properties --volatility and dividend policy-- of the underlaying stock can change at a random instant of time, but in such a way that we can forecast their final values. Under this assumption we can model actual market conditions because some of the most relevant facts that may potentially affect a firm will entail sharp predictable effects. We will analyse the consequences of this potentia…
This paper considers an optimal control of a big financial company with debt liability under bankrupt probability constraints. The company, which faces constant liability payments and has choices to choose various production/business policies from an available set of control policies with different expected profits and risks, controls the business policy and dividend payout process to maximize the expected present value of the dividends until the time of bankruptcy. However, if the dividend payout barrier is too low to be acceptable, it may result in the company's bankruptcy soon. In order to …
Avanzi et al. (2016) recently studied an optimal dividend problem where dividends are paid both periodically and continuously with different transaction costs. In the Brownian model with Poissonian periodic dividend payment opportunities, they showed that the optimal strategy is either of the pure-continuous, pure-periodic, or hybrid-barrier type. In this paper, we generalize the results of their previous study to the dual (spectrally positive Lévy) model. The optimal strategy is again of the hybrid-barrier type and can be concisely expressed using the scale function. These results are confirm…
Maximising dividends is one classical stability criterion in actuarial risk theory. Motivated by the fact that dividends are paid periodically in real life, $\textit{periodic}$ dividend strategies were recently introduced (Albrecher, Gerber and Shiu, 2011). In this paper, we incorporate fixed transaction costs into the model and study the optimal periodic dividend strategy with fixed transaction costs for spectrally negative Lévy processes. The value function of a periodic $(b_u,b_l)$ strategy is calculated by means of exiting identities and Itô's excusion when the surplus process is of unboun…
The expected present value of dividends is one of the classical stability criteria in actuarial risk theory. In this context, numerous papers considered threshold (refractive) and barrier (reflective) dividend strategies. These were shown to be optimal in a number of different contexts for bounded and unbounded payout rates, respectively. In this paper, motivated by the behaviour of some dividend paying stock exchange companies, we determine the optimal dividend strategy when both continuous (refractive) and lump sum (reflective) dividends can be paid at any time, and if they are subject to di…
We provided an analytical representation of the price of a barrier option with one type of special moving barrier. We consider the case that risk free rate, dividend rate and stock volatility are time dependent. We get a pricing formula and put call parity for barrier option when the moving barrier has a special relation with risk free rate, dividend rate and stock volatility.
Dual risk models are popular for modeling a venture capital or high tech company, for which the running cost is deterministic and the profits arrive stochastically over time. Most of the existing literature on dual risk models concentrated on the optimal dividend strategies. In this paper, we propose to study the optimal investment strategy on research and development for the dual risk models to minimize the ruin probability of the underlying company. We will also study the optimization problem when in addition the investment in a risky asset is allowed.
We develop an agent-based simulation of the catastrophe insurance and reinsurance industry and use it to study the problem of risk model homogeneity. The model simulates the balance sheets of insurance firms, who collect premiums from clients in return for ensuring them against intermittent, heavy-tailed risks. Firms manage their capital and pay dividends to their investors, and use either reinsurance contracts or cat bonds to hedge their tail risk. The model generates plausible time series of profits and losses and recovers stylized facts, such as the insurance cycle and the emergence of asym…
We study a static portfolio optimization problem with two risk measures: a principle risk measure in the objective function and a secondary risk measure whose value is controlled in the constraints. This problem is of interest when it is necessary to consider the risk preferences of two parties, such as a portfolio manager and a regulator, at the same time. A special case of this problem where the risk measures are assumed to be coherent (positively homogeneous) is studied recently in a joint work of the author. The present paper extends the analysis to a more general setting by assuming that …
The equivalence between multiportfolio time consistency of a dynamic multivariate risk measure and a supermartingale property is proven. Furthermore, the dual variables under which this set-valued supermartingale is a martingale are characterized as the worst-case dual variables in the dual representation of the risk measure. Examples of multivariate risk measures satisfying the supermartingale property are given. Crucial for obtaining the results are dual representations of scalarizations of set-valued dynamic risk measures, which are of independent interest in the fast growing literature on …
A fundamental problem in risk management is the robust aggregation of different sources of risk in a situation where little or no data are available to infer information about their dependencies. A popular approach to solving this problem is to formulate an optimization problem under which one maximizes a risk measure over all multivariate distributions that are consistent with the available data. In several special cases of such models, there exist dual problems that are easier to solve or approximate, yielding robust bounds on the aggregated risk. In this chapter we formulate a general optim…
We illustrate a problem in the self-financing condition used in the papers "Funding beyond discounting: collateral agreements and derivatives pricing" (Risk Magazine, February 2010) and "Partial Differential Equation Representations of Derivatives with Counterparty Risk and Funding Costs" (The Journal of Credit Risk, 2011). These papers state an erroneous self-financing condition. In the first paper, this is equivalent to assuming that the equity position is self-financing on its own and without including the cash position. In the second paper, this is equivalent to assuming that a subportfoli…
By specifying model free preferences towards simple nested classes of lottery pairs, we develop the dual story to stand on equal footing with that of (primal) risk apportionment. The dual story provides an intuitive interpretation, and full characterization, of dual counterparts of such concepts as prudence and temperance. The direction of preference between these nested classes of lottery pairs is equivalent to signing the successive derivatives of the probability weighting function within Yaari's (1987) dual theory. We explore implications of our results for optimal portfolio choice and show…
In decision under risk, the primal moments of mean and variance play a central role to define the local index of absolute risk aversion. In this paper, we show that in canonical non-EU models dual moments have to be used instead of, or on par with, their primal counterparts to obtain an equivalent index of absolute risk aversion.
The financial crisis showed the importance of measuring, allocating and regulating systemic risk. Recently, the systemic risk measures that can be decomposed into an aggregation function and a scalar measure of risk, received a lot of attention. In this framework, capital allocations are added after aggregation and can represent bailout costs. More recently, a framework has been introduced, where institutions are supplied with capital allocations before aggregation. This yields an interpretation that is particularly useful for regulatory purposes. In each framework, the set of all feasible cap…
One index satisfies the duality axiom if one agent, who is uniformly more risk-averse than another, accepts a gamble, the latter accepts any less risky gamble under the index. Aumann and Serrano (2008) show that only one index defined for so-called gambles satisfies the duality and positive homogeneity axioms. We call it a duality index. This paper extends the definition of duality index to all outcomes including all gambles, and considers a portfolio selection problem in a complete market, in which the agent's target is to minimize the index of the utility of the relative investment outcome. …
We establish dual representations for systemic risk measures based on acceptance sets in a general setting. We deal with systemic risk measures of both "first allocate, then aggregate" and "first aggregate, then allocate" type. In both cases, we provide a detailed analysis of the corresponding systemic acceptance sets and their support functions. The same approach delivers a simple and self-contained proof of the dual representation of utility-based risk measures for univariate positions.
In this paper, we study a dual risk model with delays in the spirit of Dassios-Zhao. When a new innovation occurs, there is a delay before the innovation turns into a profit. We obtain large initial surplus asymptotics for the ruin probability and ruin time distributions. For some special cases, we get closed-form formulas. Numerical illustrations will also be provided.
We propose an approach to the aggregation of risks which is based on estimation of simple quantities (such as covariances) associated to a vector of dependent random variables, and which avoids the use of parametric families of copulae. Our main result demonstrates that the method leads to bounds on the worst case Value at Risk for a sum of dependent random variables. Its proof applies duality theory for infinite dimensional linear programs.
In this paper, we aims to state some proprieties of willingness to pay (WTP) for partial risk reduction and links with insurance within the dual theory of decision. In the case of partial reduction, we get as Langlais (2005) that a risk-averse decision maker (DM) can have a willingness to pay small than this of a neutral one. By decomposition the WTP as Courbage and al (2008), we get that a strong averse DM is willing to give more for a reduction of a high probability portion rather than a low probability one. The main result is that in the dual theory, reducing probability of risk and supply …
