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 unbounded variation. We show that a sufficient condition for optimality is that the Lévy measure admits a density which is completely monotonic. Under such assumptions, a periodic $(b_u,b_l)$ strategy is confirmed to be optimal.
Results are illustrated.
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…
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…
This paper studies the bailout optimal dividend problem with regime switching under the constraint that dividend payments can be made only at the arrival times of an independent Poisson process while capital can be injected continuously in time. We show the optimality of the regime-modulated Parisian-classical reflection strategy when the underlying risk model follows a general spectrally negative Markov additive process. In order to verify the optimality, first we study an auxiliary problem driven by a single spectrally negative \lev process with a final payoff at an exponential terminal time…
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…
For an insurance company with reserve modeled by the spectrally negative Lévy process, we study the optimal impulse dividend maximizing the expected accumulated net dividend payment subtracted by the accumulated cost of injecting capital. In this setting, the beneficiary of the dividends injects capital to ensure a non-negative risk process so that the insurer never goes bankrupt. The optimal impulse dividend and capital injection strategy together with its value function are obtained.
In this paper we consider dividend problem for an insurance company whose risk evolves as a spectrally negative Lévy process (in the absence of dividend payments) when Parisian delay is applied. The objective function is given by the cumulative discounted dividends received until the moment of ruin when so-called barrier strategy is applied. Additionally we will consider two possibilities of delay. In the first scenario ruin happens when the surplus process stays below zero longer than fixed amount of time $ζ>0$. In the second case there is a time lag $d$ between decision of paying dividends a…
In this paper, we investigate the problem of optimal strategies of dividend and reinsurance under the Cramér-Lundberg risk model embedded with the thinning-dependence structure which was firstly introduced by Wang and Yuen (2005), subject to the optimality criteria of maximizing the expected accumulated discounted dividends paid until ruin. To enhance the practical relevance of the optimal dividend and reinsurance problem, non-cheap reinsurance is considered and transaction costs and taxes are imposed on dividends, which converts our optimization problem into a mixed classical-impulse control …
In this paper, we model the cash surplus (or equity) of a risky business with a Brownian motion. Owners can take cash out of the surplus in the form of "dividends", subject to transaction costs. However, if the surplus hits 0 then ruin occurs and the business cannot operate any more. We consider two types of dividend distributions: (i) periodic, regular ones (that is, dividends can be paid only at countable many points in time, according to a specific arrival process); and (ii) extraordinary dividend payments that can be made immediately at any time (that is, the dividend decision time space i…
In Bai and Paulsen (SIAM J. Control optim. 48, 2010) the optimal dividend problem under transaction costs was analyzed for a rather general class of diffusion processes. It was divided into several subclasses, and for the majority of subclasses the optimal policy is a simple barrier policy; whenever the process hits an upper barrier $\bar{u}^*$, reduce it to $\bar{u}^*-ξ$ through a dividend payment. After transaction costs, the shareholder receives $kξ-K$. It was proved that a simple barrier strategy is not always optimal, and here these more difficult cases are solved. The optimal solutions a…
In this paper, we revisit the optimal periodic dividend problem, in which dividend payments can only be made at the jump times of an independent Poisson process. In the dual (spectrally positive Lévy) model, recent results have shown the optimality of a periodic barrier strategy, which pays dividends at Poissonian dividend-decision times, if and only if the surplus is above some level. In this paper, we show the optimality of this strategy for a spectrally negative Lévy process whose dual has a completely monotone Lévy density. The optimal strategies and value functions are concisely written i…
The optimal dividend problem by De Finetti (1957) has been recently generalized to the spectrally negative Lévy model where the implementation of optimal strategies draws upon the computation of scale functions and their derivatives. This paper proposes a phase-type fitting approximation of the optimal strategy. We consider spectrally negative Lévy processes with phase-type jumps as well as meromorphic Lévy processes (Kuznetsov et al., 2010a), and use their scale functions to approximate the scale function for a general spectrally negative Lévy process. We obtain analytically the convergence r…
This paper studies the bail-out optimal dividend problem with regime switching under the constraint that the cumulative dividend strategy is absolutely continuous. We confirm the optimality of the regime-modulated refraction-reflection strategy when the underlying risk model follows a general spectrally negative Markov additive process. To verify the conjecture of a barrier type optimal control, we first introduce and study an auxiliary problem with the final payoff at an exponential terminal time and characterize the optimal threshold explicitly using fluctuation identities of the refracted-r…
In this paper, we study the optimal control problem for a company whose surplus process evolves as an upward jump diffusion with random return on investment. Three types of practical optimization problems faced by a company that can control its liquid reserves by paying dividends and injecting capital. In the first problem, we consider the classical dividend problem without capital injections. The second problem aims at maximizing the expected discounted dividend payments minus the expected discounted costs of capital injections over strategies with positive surplus at all times. The third pro…
Optimal Reinsurance-Dividend Strategy with Fixed Transaction Costs in a Regime-Switching Brownian Risk Model: A Viscosity Solution to the Impulse Control Problem
Fujian Normal University（福建师范大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）
We introduce a longevity feature to the classical optimal dividend problem by adding a constraint on the time of ruin of the firm. We extend the results in \cite{HJ15}, now in context of one-sided Lévy risk models. We consider de Finetti's problem in both scenarios with and without fix transaction costs, e.g. taxes. We also study the constrained analog to the so called Dual model. To characterize the solution to the aforementioned models we introduce the dual problem and show that the complementary slackness conditions are satisfied and therefore there is no duality gap. As a consequence the o…
The first motivation of our paper is to explore further the idea that, in risk control problems, it may be profitable to base decisions both on the position of the underlying process Xt and on its supremum Xt := sup 0$\le$s$\le$t Xs. Strongly connected to Azema-Yor/generalized draw-down/trailing stop time (see [AY79]), this framework provides a natural unification of draw-down and classic first passage times. We illustrate here the potential of this unified framework by solving a variation of the De Finetti problem of maximizing expected discounted cumulative dividends/consumption gained under…
We consider a modification of the dividend maximization problem from ruin theory. Based on a classical risk process we maximize the difference of expected cumulated discounted dividends and total expected discounted additional funding (subject to some proportional transaction costs). For modelling dividends we use the common approach whereas for the funding opportunity we use the jump times of another independent Poisson process at which we choose an appropriate funding height. In case of exponentially distributed claims we are able to determine an explicit solution to the problem and derive a…
In this paper we consider the De Finetti's optimal dividend and capital injection problem under a Markov additive model. We assume that the surplus process before dividends and capital injections follows a spectrally positive Markov additive process. Dividend payments are made only at the jump times of an independent Poisson process. Capitals are required to be injected whenever needed to ensure a non-negative surplus process to avoid bankruptcy. Our purpose is to characterize the optimal periodic dividend and capital injection strategy that maximizes the expected total discounted dividends su…
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…
This paper studies the optimal dividend problem with capital injection under the constraint that the cumulative dividend strategy is absolutely continuous. We consider an open problem of the general spectrally negative case and derive the optimal solution explicitly using the fluctuation identities of the refracted-reflected Lévy process. The optimal strategy as well as the value function are concisely written in terms of the scale function. Numerical results are also provided to confirm the analytical conclusions.
This paper studies de Finetti's optimal dividend problem with capital injection. We confirm the optimality of a double barrier strategy when the underlying risk model follows a Lévy process that may have positive and negative jumps. The main result in this paper is a generalization of Theorem 3 in Avram et al.(2007), which is the spectrally negative case, and Theorem 3.1 in Bayraktar et al.(2013), which is the spectrally positive case. In contrast with the spectrally one-sided cases, double barrier strategies cannot be handled by using scale functions to obtain some properties of the expected …
We study the dual model with capital injection under the additional condition that the dividend strategy is absolutely continuous. We consider a refraction-reflection strategy that pays dividends at the maximal rate whenever the surplus is above a certain threshold, while capital is injected so that it stays positive. The resulting controlled surplus process becomes the spectrally positive version of the refracted-reflected process recently studied by Pérez and Yamazaki (2015). We study various fluctuation identities of this process and prove the optimality of the refraction-reflection strateg…
In this paper, we study de Finetti's optimal dividend problem with capital injection under the assumption that the dividend strategies are absolutely continuous. In many previous studies, the process before being controlled was assumed to be a spectrally one-sided Lévy process, however in this paper we use a Lévy process that may have both positive and negative jumps. In the main theorem, we show that a refraction--reflection strategy is an optimal strategy. We also mention the existence and uniqueness of solutions of the stochastic differential equations that define refracted Lévy processes.
