This hub holds the mathematical engine room of quantitative finance: stochastic control (choose a policy that steers a diffusion), optimal stopping (choose a time to act), and the machinery that solves them — Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equations, viscosity solutions, backward stochastic differential equations, and mean-field games for the many-player limit. The classic applications are Merton-style consumption and investment, optimal liquidation, dividend and reinsurance control, and American-option exercise.
Most papers here are Lab Rats by our scoring: deep theory, little or no data. That is not a criticism of the work, but it changes how you read it. The questions that matter are whether the model’s state variables are observable in practice, whether the closed-form or numerical solution degrades gracefully when parameters are estimated rather than known, and whether a paper that claims a strategy ever confronts it with transaction costs or discrete rebalancing. The handful of papers that pair a control result with a calibrated numerical study rank highest below.
Related hubs: Options & Derivatives, Portfolio Optimization, HFT & Optimal Execution, Insurance & Actuarial Risk.
In this paper, we first conduct a study of the portfolio selection problem, incorporating both exogenous (proportional) and endogenous (resulting from liquidity risk, characterized by a stochastic process) transaction costs through the utility-based approach. We also consider the intrinsic relations
This paper is concerned with the maximum principle and dynamic programming principle for mean-variance portfolio selection of jump diffusions and their relationship. First, the optimal portfolio and efficient frontier of the problem are obtained using both methods. Furthermore, the relationship betw
This paper investigates the optimal hedging strategies of an informed broker interacting with multiple traders in a financial market. We develop a theoretical framework in which the broker, possessing exclusive information about the drift of the asset’s price, engages with traders whose trading acti
We formulate and solve an optimal trading problem with alpha signals, where transactions induce a nonlinear transient price impact described by a general propagator model, including power-law decay. Using a variational approach, we demonstrate that the optimal trading strategy satisfies a nonlinear
The G-expectation is a sublinear expectation. It is an important tool for pricing financial products and managing risk thanks to its ability to deal with model uncertainty. The problem is how to efficiently quantify it since the commonly used Monte Carlo method does not work. Fortunately, the expect
This paper studies an optimal consumption problem with both relaxed benchmark tracking and consumption drawdown constraint, leading to a stochastic control problem with dynamic state-control constraints. In our relaxed tracking formulation, it is assumed that the fund manager can strategically injec
This paper considers an insurance company that faces two key constraints: a ratcheting dividend constraint and an irreversible reinsurance constraint. The company allocates part of its reserve to pay dividends to its shareholders while strategically purchasing reinsurance for its claims. The ratchet
We study liquidity provision in the presence of exogenous competition. We consider a reference market maker' who monitors her inventory and the aggregated inventory of the competing market makers. We assume that the competing market makers use a rule of thumb’ to determine their posted depths, dep
We study the impact of regulatory capital constraints on fire sales and financial stability in a large banking system using a mean field game model. In our model banks adjust their holdings of a risky asset via trading strategies with finite trading rate in order to maximize expected profits. Moreov
This paper concerns a continuous time mean-variance (MV) portfolio selection problem in a jump-diffusion financial model with no-shorting trading constraint. The problem is reduced to two subproblems: solving a stochastic linear-quadratic (LQ) control problem under control constraint, and finding a
This paper studies a risk-sensitive decision-making problem under uncertainty. It considers a decision-making process that unfolds over a fixed number of stages, in which a decision-maker chooses among multiple alternatives, some of which are deterministic and others are stochastic. The decision-mak
In this note we consider the maximization of the expected terminal wealth for the setup of quadratic transaction costs. First, we provide a very simple probabilistic solution to the problem. Although the problem was largely studied, as far as we know up to date this simple and probabilistic form of
The Merton investment-consumption problem is fundamental, both in the field of finance, and in stochastic control. An important extension of the problem adds transaction costs, which is highly relevant from a financial perspective but also challenging from a control perspective because the solution
This paper addresses the portfolio selection problem for nonlinear law-dependent preferences in continuous time, which inherently exhibit time inconsistency. Employing the method of stochastic maximum principle, we establish verification theorems for equilibrium strategies, accommodating both random
The focus of this paper is on identifying the most effective selling strategy for pairs trading of stocks. In pairs trading, a long position is held in one stock while a short position is held in another. The goal is to determine the optimal time to sell the long position and repurchase the short po
Volume imbalance in a limit order book is often considered as a reliable indicator for predicting future price moves. In this work, we seek to analyse the nuances of the relationship between prices and volume imbalance. To this end, we study a market-making problem which allows us to view the imbala
We propose a macroscopic market making model à la Avellaneda-Stoikov, using continuous processes for orders instead of discrete point processes. The model intends to bridge the gap between market making and optimal execution problems, while shedding light on the influence of order flows on the optim
In this paper, we study the exponential utility indifference pricing of pure endowment policies within a stochastic-factor model for an insurer who also invests in a financial market. Our framework incorporates a hazard rate modeled as an observable diffusion process, while the risky asset price fol
We study a dynamic stochastic control problem subject to Knightian uncertainty with multi-objective (vector-valued) criteria. Assuming the preferences across expected multi-loss vectors are represented by a given, yet general, preorder, we address the model uncertainty by adopting a robust or minima
We study the problem of optimal portfolio selection under stochastic volatility within a continuous time reinforcement learning framework with portfolio constraints. Exploration is modeled through entropy-regularized relaxed controls, where the investor selects probability distributions over admissi