We study the optimal investment-consumption problem for a member of defined contribution plan during the decumulation phase. For a fixed annuitization time, to achieve higher final annuity, we consider a variable consumption rate. Moreover, to have a minimum guarantee for the final annuity, a safety level for the wealth process is considered. To solve the stochastic optimal control problem via dynamic programming, we obtain a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation on a bounded domain. The existence and uniqueness of classical solutions are proved through the dual transformation. We apply the finite difference method to find numerical approximations of the solution of the HJB equation. Finally, the simulation results for the optimal investment-consumption strategies, optimal wealth process and the final annuity for different admissible ranges of consumption are given. Furthermore, by taking into account the market present value of the cash flows before and after the annuitization, we compare the outcomes of different scenarios.
We quantify the benefit of collectivised investment funds, in which the assets of members who die are shared among the survivors. For our model, with realistic parameter choices, an annuity or individual fund requires approximately 20\% more initial capital to provide as good an outcome as a collectivised investment fund. We demonstrate the importance of the new concept of pension adequacy in defining investor preferences and determining optimal fund management. We show how to manage heterogeneous funds of investors with diverse needs. Our framework can be applied to existing pension products,…
In this paper,we study the individual's optimal retirement time and optimal consumption under habitual persistence. Because the individual feels equally satisfied with a lower habitual level and is more reluctant to change the habitual level after retirement, we assume that both the level and the sensitivity of the habitual consumption decline at the time of retirement. We establish the concise form of the habitual evolutions, and obtain the optimal retirement time and consumption policy based on martingale and duality methods. The optimal consumption experiences a sharp decline at retirement,…
The transition from defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans shifts the responsibility for saving toward retirement from governments and institutions to the individuals. Determining optimal saving and investment strategy for individuals is paramount for stable financial stance and for avoiding poverty during work-life and retirement, and it is a particularly challenging task in a world where form of employment and income trajectory experienced by different occupation groups are highly diversified. We introduce a model in which agents learn optimal portfolio allocation and saving s…
For an exponential utility maximizing investment strategy in a Black-Scholes Setting, fixed upper and lower constraints are introduced on the terminal wealth. This is equivalent to combining the optimal strategy with options. The resulting distribution is investigated in terms of change of quantiles. The theory is illustrated with quantitative examples, including an assessment of the effects of restricting the strategy to positive investments.
This paper studies an optimal investment and consumption problem with heterogeneous consumption of basic and luxury goods, together with the choice of time for retirement. The utility for luxury goods is not necessarily a concave function. The optimal heterogeneous consumption strategies for a class of non-homothetic utility maximizer are shown to consume only basic goods when the wealth is small, to consume basic goods and make savings when the wealth is intermediate, and to consume almost all in luxury goods when the wealth is large. The optimal retirement policy is shown to be both universa…
In this work we analytically solve an optimal retirement problem, in which the agent optimally allocates the risky investment, consumption and leisure rate to maximise a gain function characterised by a power utility function of consumption and leisure, through the duality method. We impose different liquidity constraints over different time spans and conduct a sensitivity analysis to discover the effect of this kind of constraint.
Demographic changes increase the necessity to base the pension system more and more on the second and the third pillar, namely the occupational and private pension plans; this paper deals with Target Date Funds (TDFs), which are a typical investment opportunity for occupational pension planners. TDFs are usually identified with a decreasing fraction of wealth invested in equity (a so-called glide path) as retirement comes closer, i.e., wealth is invested more risky the younger the saver is. We investigate whether this is actually optimal in the presence of non-tradable income risk in a stochas…
In this paper we consider the problem of optimizing lifetime consumption under a habit formation model. Our work differs from previous results, because we incorporate mortality and pension income. Lifetime utility of consumption makes the problem time inhomogeneous, because of the effect of ageing. Considering habit formation means increasing the dimension of the stochastic control problem, because one must track smoothed-consumption using an additional variable, habit $\bar c$. Including exogenous pension income $π$ means that we cannot rely on a kind of scaling transformation to reduce the d…
We investigate the general structure of optimal investment and consumption with small proportional transaction costs. For a safe asset and a risky asset with general continuous dynamics, traded with random and time-varying but small transaction costs, we derive simple formal asymptotics for the optimal policy and welfare. These reveal the roles of the investors' preferences as well as the market and cost dynamics, and also lead to a fully dynamic model for the implied trading volume. In frictionless models that can be solved in closed form, explicit formulas for the leading-order corrections d…
We study an optimal consumption and investment problem in a possibly incomplete market with general, not necessarily convex, stochastic constraints. We give explicit solutions for investors with exponential, logarithmic and power utility. Our approach is based on martingale methods which rely on recent results on the existence and uniqueness of solutions to BSDEs with drivers of quadratic growth.
The classical optimal investment and consumption problem with infinite horizon is studied in the presence of transaction costs. Both proportional and fixed costs as well as general utility functions are considered. Weak dynamic programming is proved in the general setting and a comparison result for possibly discontinuous viscosity solutions of the dynamic programming equation is provided. Detailed numerical experiments illustrate several properties of the optimal investment strategies.
The aim of this paper is to solve an optimal investment, consumption and life insurance problem when the investor is restricted to capital guarantee. We consider an incomplete market described by a jump-diffusion model with stochastic volatility. Using the martingale approach, we prove the existence of the optimal strategy and the optimal martingale measure and we obtain the explicit solutions for the power utility functions.
In a market with stochastic investment opportunities, we study an optimal consumption investment problem for an agent with recursive utility of Epstein-Zin type. Focusing on the empirically relevant specification where both risk aversion and elasticity of intertemporal substitution are in excess of one, we characterize optimal consumption and investment strategies via backward stochastic differential equations. The supperdifferential of indirect utility is also obtained, meeting demands from applications in which Epstein-Zin utilities were used to resolve several asset pricing puzzles. The emp…
We consider a spread financial market defined by the multidimensional Ornstein--Uhlenbeck (OU) process. We study the optimal consumption/investment problem for logarithmic utility functions in the base of stochastic dynamical programming method. We show a special Verification Theorem for this case. We find the solution to the Hamilton--Jacobi--Bellman (HJB) equation in explicit form and as a consequence we construct the optimal financial strategies. Moreover, we study the constructed strategy by numerical simulations.
This paper studies an optimal investing problem for a retiree facing longevity risk and living standard risk. We formulate the investing problem as a portfolio choice problem under a time-varying risk capacity constraint. We derive the optimal investment strategy under the specific condition on model parameters in terms of second-order ordinary differential equations. We demonstrate an endogenous number that measures the expected value to sustain the spending post-retirement. The optimal portfolio is nearly neutral to the stock market movement if the portfolio's value is higher than this numbe…
We consider the problem of optimal investment with intermediate consumption in a general semimartingale model of an incomplete market, with preferences being represented by a utility stochastic field. We show that the key conclusions of the utility maximization theory hold under the assumptions of no unbounded profit with bounded risk (NUPBR) and of the finiteness of both primal and dual value functions.
This paper is devoted to invest an optimal investment strategy for a defined-contribution (DC) pension plan under the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (O-U) process and the loan. By considering risk-free asset, a risky asset driven by O-U process and a loan in the financial market, we firstly set up the dynamic equation and the asset market model which are instrumental in achieving the expected utility of ultimate wealth at retirement. Secondly, the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman(HJB) equation is derived by means of dynamic programming principle. The explicit expression for the optimal investment str…
This paper considers the problem of consumption and investment in a financial market within a continuous time stochastic economy. The investor exhibits a change in the discount rate. The investment opportunities are a stock and a riskless account. The market coefficients and discount factor switch according to a finite state Markov chain. The change in the discount rate leads to time inconsistencies of the investor's decisions. The randomness in our model is driven by a Brownian motion and a Markov chain. Following Ekeland and Pirvu we introduce and characterize the subgame perfect strategies.…
We discuss an optimal investment, consumption and insurance problem of a wage earner under inflation. Assume a wage earner investing in a real money account and three asset prices, namely: a real zero coupon bond, the inflation-linked real money account and a risky share described by jump-diffusion processes. Using the theory of quadratic-exponential backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE) with jumps approach, we derive the optimal strategy for the two typical utilities (exponential and power) and the value function is characterized as a solution of BSDE with jumps. Finally, we derive…
We revisit the optimal investment and consumption model of Davis and Norman (1990) and Shreve and Soner (1994), following a shadow-price approach similar to that of Kallsen and Muhle-Karbe (2010). Making use of the completeness of the model without transaction costs, we reformulate and reduce the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation for this singular stochastic control problem to a non-standard free-boundary problem for a first-order ODE with an integral constraint. Having shown that the free boundary problem has a smooth solution, we use it to construct the solution of the original optimal invest…
In this paper, we study a stochastic optimal control problem with stochastic volatility. We prove the sufficient and necessary maximum principle for the proposed problem. Then we apply the results to solve an investment, consumption and life insurance problem with stochastic volatility, that is, we consider a wage earner investing in one risk-free asset and one risky asset described by a jump-diffusion process and has to decide concerning consumption and life insurance purchase. We assume that the life insurance for the wage earner is bought from a market composed of $M>1$ life insurance compa…
We study the effect of liquidity freezes on an economic agent optimizing her utility of consumption in a perturbed Black-Scholes-Merton model. The single risky asset follows a geometric Brownian motion but is subject to liquidity shocks, during which no trading is possible and stock dynamics are modified. The liquidity regime is governed by a two-state Markov chain. We derive the asymptotic effect of such freezes on optimal consumption and investment schedules in the two cases of (i) small probability of liquidity shock; (ii) fast-scale liquidity regime switching. Explicit formulas are obtaine…
We investigate optimal consumption and investment problems for a Black-Scholes market under uniform restrictions on Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall. We formulate various utility maximization problems, which can be solved explicitly. We compare the optimal solutions in form of optimal value, optimal control and optimal wealth to analogous problems under additional uniform risk bounds. Our proofs are partly based on solutions to Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations, and we prove a corresponding verification theorem. This work was supported by the European Science Foundation through the AMaMeF …
We extend the Annually Recalculated Virtual Annuity (ARVA) spending rule for retirement savings decumulation to include a cap and a floor on withdrawals. With a minimum withdrawal constraint, the ARVA strategy runs the risk of depleting the investment portfolio. We determine the dynamic asset allocation strategy which maximizes a weighted combination of expected total withdrawals (EW) and expected shortfall (ES), defined as the average of the worst five per cent of the outcomes of real terminal wealth. We compare the performance of our dynamic strategy to simpler alternatives which maintain co…
We consider an investor who wants to select her/his optimal consumption, investment and insurance policies. Motivated by new insurance products, we allow not only the financial marke but also the insurable loss to depend on the regime of the economy. The objective of the investor is to maximize her/his expected total discounted utility of consumption over an infinite time horizon. For the case of hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) utility functions, we obtain the first explicit solutions for simultaneous optimal consumption, investment, and insurance problems when there is regime switchi…
We study the utility maximization problem for power utility random fields in a semimartingale financial market, with and without intermediate consumption. The notion of an opportunity process is introduced as a reduced form of the value process of the resulting stochastic control problem. We show how the opportunity process describes the key objects: optimal strategy, value function, and dual problem. The results are applied to obtain monotonicity properties of the optimal consumption.
This paper considers an optimal life insurance for a householder subject to mortality risk. The household receives a wage income continuously, which is terminated by unexpected (premature) loss of earning power or (planned and intended) retirement, whichever happens first. In order to hedge the risk of losing income stream by householder's unpredictable event, the household enters a life insurance contract by paying a premium to an insurance company. The household may also invest their wealth into a financial market. The problem is to determine an optimal insurance/investment/consumption strat…
We investigate optimal consumption problems for a Black-Scholes market under uniform restrictions on Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall for logarithmic utility functions. We find the solutions in terms of a dynamic strategy in explicit form, which can be compared and interpreted. This paper continues our previous work, where we solved similar problems for power utility functions.
We discuss the turnpike property for optimal investment and consumption problems. We find there exists a threshold value that determines the turnpike property for investment policy. The threshold value only depends on the Sharpe ratio, the riskless interest rate and the discount rate. We show that if utilities behave asymptotically like power utilities and satisfy some simple relations with the threshold value, then the turnpike property for investment holds. There is in general no turnpike property for consumption policy. We also provide the rate of convergence and illustrate the main results…
We propose a consumption-investment decision model where past consumption peak $h$ plays a crucial role. There are two important consumption levels: the lowest constrained level and a reference level, at which the risk aversion in terms of consumption rate is changed. We solve this stochastic control problem and derive the value function, optimal consumption plan, and optimal investment strategy in semi-explicit forms. We find five important thresholds of wealth, all as functions of $h$, and most of them are nonlinear functions. As can be seen from numerical results and theoretical analysis, t…
A continuous-time consumption-investment model with constraint is considered for a small investor whose decisions are the consumption rate and the allocation of wealth to a risk-free and a risky asset with logarithmic Brownian motion fluctuations. The consumption rate is subject to an upper bound constraint which linearly depends on the investor's wealth and bankruptcy is prohibited. The investor's objective is to maximize total expected discounted utility of consumption over an infinite trading horizon. It is shown that the value function is (second order) smooth everywhere but a unique possi…
We consider an optimal investment and consumption problem for a Black-Scholes financial market with stochastic coefficients driven by a diffusion process. We assume that an agent makes consumption and investment decisions based on CRRA utility functions. The dynamical programming approach leads to an investigation of the Hamilton Jacobi Bellman (HJB) equation which is a highly non linear partial differential equation (PDE) of the second oder. By using the Feynman - Kac representation we prove uniqueness and smoothness of the solution. Moreover, we study the optimal convergence rate of the iter…
We introduce an extension to Merton's famous continuous time model of optimal consumption and investment, in the spirit of previous works by Pliska and Ye, to allow for a wage earner to have a random lifetime and to use a portion of the income to purchase life insurance in order to provide for his estate, while investing his savings in a financial market comprised of one risk-free security and an arbitrary number of risky securities driven by multi-dimensional Brownian motion. We then provide a detailed analysis of the optimal consumption, investment, and insurance purchase strategies for the …
This paper studies a life-time consumption-investment problem under the Black-Scholes framework, where the consumption rate is subject to a lower bound constraint that linearly depends on her wealth. It is a stochastic control problem with state-dependent control constraint to which the standard stochastic control theory cannot be directly applied. We overcome this by transforming it into an equivalent stochastic control problem in which the control constraint is state-independent so that the standard theory can be applied. We give an explicit optimal consumption-investment strategy when the c…
We consider a problem of optimal investment with intermediate consumption and random endowment in an incomplete semimartingale model of a financial market. We establish the key assertions of the utility maximization theory assuming that both primal and dual value functions are finite in the interiors of their domains as well as that random endowment at maturity can be dominated by the terminal value of a self-financing wealth process. In order to facilitate verification of these conditions, we present alternative, but equivalent conditions, under which the conclusions of the theory hold.
We consider an illiquid financial market with different regimes modeled by a continuous-time finite-state Markov chain. The investor can trade a stock only at the discrete arrival times of a Cox process with intensity depending on the market regime. Moreover, the risky asset price is subject to liquidity shocks, which change its rate of return and volatility, and induce jumps on its dynamics. In this setting, we study the problem of an economic agent optimizing her expected utility from consumption under a non-bankruptcy constraint. By using the dynamic programming method, we provide the chara…
We consider a problem of optimal investment with intermediate consumption in the framework of an incomplete semimartingale model of a financial market. We show that a necessary and sufficient condition for the validity of key assertions of the theory is that the value functions of the primal and dual problems are finite
In this article we solve the problem of maximizing the expected utility of future consumption and terminal wealth to determine the optimal pension or life-cycle fund strategy for a cohort of pension fund investors. The setup is strongly related to a DC pension plan where additionally (individual) consumption is taken into account. The consumption rate is subject to a time-varying minimum level and terminal wealth is subject to a terminal floor. Moreover, the preference between consumption and terminal wealth as well as the intertemporal coefficient of risk aversion are time-varying and therefo…
We consider an optimal investment and consumption problem for a Black-Scholes financial market with stochastic volatility and unknown stock appreciation rate. The volatility parameter is driven by an external economic factor modeled as a diffusion process of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type with unknown drift. We use the dynamical programming approach and find an optimal financial strategy which depends on the drift parameter. To estimate the drift coefficient we observe the economic factor $Y$ in an interval $[0,T_0]$ for fixed $T_0>0$, and use sequential estimation. We show, that the consumption and …
We study a problem of optimal investment/consumption over an infinite horizon in a market consisting of a liquid and an illiquid asset. The liquid asset is observed and can be traded continuously, while the illiquid one can only be traded and observed at discrete random times corresponding to the jumps of a Poisson process. The problem is a nonstandard mixed discrete/continuous optimal control problem which we face by the dynamic programming approach. The main aim of the paper is to prove that the value function is the unique viscosity solution of an associated HJB equation. We then use such r…
We consider a model of optimal investment and consumption with both habit formation and partial observations in incomplete Itô processes market. The investor chooses his consumption under the addictive habits constraint while only observing the market stock prices but not the instantaneous rate of return. Applying the Kalman-Bucy filtering theorem and the Dynamic Programming arguments, we solve the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation explicitly for the path dependent stochastic control problem in the case of power utilities. We provide the optimal investment and consumption polic…
In this article we consider the optimal investment-consumption problem for an agent with preferences governed by Epstein-Zin stochastic differential utility who invests in a constant-parameter Black-Scholes-Merton market. The paper has three main goals: first, to provide a detailed introduction to infinite-horizon Epstein-Zin stochastic differential utility, including a discussion of which parameter combinations lead to a well-formulated problem; second, to prove existence and uniqueness of infinite horizon Epstein-Zin stochastic differential utility under a restriction on the parameters gover…
Optimal Investment and Consumption in Financial Markets with Integrated Variance Clocks
CMAP, École Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）；Department of Statistics, University of Warwick（华威大学统计学系）；Institut für Stochastik und Anwendungen, University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学随机数学与应用研究所）
We study a portfolio management problem featuring many-player and mean field competition, investment and consumption, and relative performance concerns under the forward performance processes (FPP) framework. We focus on agents using power (CRRA) type FPPs for their investment-consumption optimization problem under a common noise Merton market model. We solve both the many-player and mean field game providing closed-form expressions for the solutions where the limit of the former yields the latter. In our case, the FPP framework yields a continuum of solutions for the consumption component as …
