Shadow Prices For Continuous Processes
Published online on September 18, 2015
Abstract
In a financial market with a continuous price process and proportional transaction costs, we investigate the problem of utility maximization of terminal wealth. We give sufficient conditions for the existence of a shadow price process, i.e., a least favorable frictionless market leading to the same optimal strategy and utility as in the original market under transaction costs. The crucial ingredients are the continuity of the price process and the hypothesis of “no unbounded profit with bounded risk.” A counterexample reveals that these hypotheses cannot be relaxed.