Abstract
Minimum-cost portfolio insurance is an investment strategy that enables an investor to avoid losses while still capturing gains of a payoff of a portfolio at minimum cost. If derivative markets are complete, then holding a put option in conjunction with the reference portfolio provides minimum-cost insurance at arbitrary arbitrage-free security prices. We derive a characterization of incomplete derivative markets in which the minimum-cost portfolio insurance is independent of arbitrage-free security prices. Our characterization relies on the theory of lattice-subspaces. We establish that a necessary and sufficient condition for price-independent minimum-cost portfolio insurance is that the asset span is a lattice-subspace of the space of contingent claims. If the asset span is a lattice-subspace, then the minimum-cost portfolio insurance can be easily calculated as a portfolio that replicates the targeted payoff in a subset of states which is the same for every reference portfolio.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1703-1719 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 11-12 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 2000 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors are pleased to acknowledge the suggestions and comments of Peter Bossaerts, Phillip Henrotte and Yiannis Polyrakis. The research of C.D. Aliprantis was partially supported by the 1995 PENED Program of the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Technology of Greece and by the NATO Collaborative Research Grant #941059. Roko Aliprantis also expresses his deep appreciation for the hospitality provided by the Department of Economics and the Center for Analytic Economics at Cornell University and the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences of the California Institute of Technology where parts of this paper were written during his sabbatical leave (January–June, 1996). Jan Werner acknowledges the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemainschaft, SFB 303.