This paper investigates a financial market where stock returns depend on an unobservable Gaussian mean reverting drift process. Information on the drift is obtained from returns and randomly arriving discrete-time expert opinions. Drift estimates are based on Kalman filter techniques. We study the asymptotic behavior of the filter for high-frequency experts with variances that grow linearly with the arrival intensity. The derived limit theorems state that the information provided by discrete-time expert opinions is asymptotically the same as that from observing a certain diffusion process. These diffusion approximations are extremely helpful for deriving simplified approximate solutions of utility maximization problems.

We consider a finite-time optimal consumption problem where an investor wants to maximize the expected hyperbolic absolute risk aversion utility of consumption and terminal wealth. We treat a stochastic factor model in which the mean returns of risky assets depend linearly on underlying economic factors formulated as the solutions of linear stochastic differential equations. We discuss the partial information case in which the investor cannot observe the factor process and uses only past information of risky assets. Then our problem is formulated as a stochastic control problem with partial information. We derive the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation. We solve this equation to obtain an explicit form of the value function and the optimal strategy for this problem. Moreover, we also introduce the results obtained by the martingale method.

This paper addresses a new differential game problem with forward-backward doubly stochastic differential equations. There are two distinguishing features. One is that our game systems are initial coupled, rather than terminal coupled. The other is that the admissible control is required to be adapted to a subset of the information generated by the underlying Brownian motions. We establish a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for an equilibrium point of nonzero-sum games and a saddle point of zero-sum games. To illustrate some possible applications, an example of linear-quadratic nonzero-sum differential games is worked out. Applying stochastic filtering techniques, we obtain an explicit expression of the equilibrium point.

Asymmetric or partial information in financial markets may berepresented by different filtrations. We consider the case of alarger filtration F – the natural filtration of the“model world” – and a subfiltration $\hat{\mathcal F}$ thatrepresents the information available to an agent in the “realworld”. Given a price system on the larger filtration that isrepresented by a martingale measure Q and an associated numeraire S, we show that there is a canonical and nontrivial numeraire Ŝ such that the price system generated by(Ŝ,Q, $\hat{\mathcal F}$ ) is consistent, in a sense to be madeprecise, with the price system generated by (S,Q,F).

We study the uncertain dichotomous choice model. In this model, a group of expert decision makers is required to select one of two alternatives. The applications of this model are relevant to a wide variety of areas. A decision rule translates the individual opinions of the members into a group decision, and is optimal if it maximizes the probability of the group making a correct choice. In this paper, we assume the correctness probabilities of the experts to be independent random variables selected from some given distribution. Moreover, the ranking of the members in the group is (at least partly) known. Thus, one can follow rules based on this ranking. The extremes are the expert rule and the majority rule. The probabilities of the two extreme rules being optimal were compared in a series of early papers, for a variety of distributions. In most cases, the asymptotic behaviours of the probabilities of the two extreme rules followed the same patterns. Do these patterns hold in general? If not, what are the ranges of possible asymptotic behaviours of the probabilities of the two extreme rules being optimal? In this paper, we provide satisfactory answers to these questions.

Sapir (1998) calculated the probabilities of the expert rule and of the simple majority rule being optimal under the assumption of exponentially distributed logarithmic expertise levels. Here we find the analogous probabilities for the family of restricted majority rules, including the above two extreme rules as special cases, and the family of balanced expert rules. We compare the two families, the rules within each family, and all rules of the two families with the extreme rules.