An Advanced Levy Market Model

In this study, general geometric Levy market models are considered. Since these models are, in general, incomplete, that is, all contingent claims cannot be replicated by a self-financing portfolio consisting of investments in a risk-free bond and in the stock, it is suggested that the market should be enlarged by artificial assets based on the power-jump processes of the underlying Levy process. Then it is shown that the enlarged market is complete and the explicit hedging portfolios for claims whose payoff function depends on the prices of the stock and the artificial assets at maturity are derived. Furthermore, the portfolio optimization problem is considered in the enlarged market. It is shown that for particular choices of the equivalent martingale measure in the market, the optimal portfolio only consists of bonds and stocks. This corresponds to completing the market with additional assets in such a way that they are superfluous in the sense that the terminal expected utility is not improved by including these assets in the portfolio. This book, therefore, should be useful to postgraduates and researchers in mathematical finance.