[pt] Em problemas de decisão sob incerteza que dependam da preferência entre fluxos multi-período, como é o caso dos problemas de comercialização de contratos de energia elétrica no Brasil, o agente deve saber expressar sua preferência por diferentes distribuições em cada período e, além disso, deve também especificar uma preferência entre períodos. Classicamente a abordagem utilizada é definir um funcional de preferência de von Neumann e Morgenstern separável entre os períodos, composto pela soma da esperança de utilidades que modelam a preferência em cada período. Então, para expressar a preferência entre períodos, esta soma é ponderada por um fator de desconto que visa expressar a impaciência do agente no consumo entre os períodos. Nesta abordagem, a especificação do fator de desconto torna-se uma tarefa bastante subjetiva, uma vez que estamos ponderando utilidades esperadas e não valores monetários. Devido a essa subjetividade e da dificuldade de se especificar a própria função utilidade de cada período, os grupos de finanças divergiram para uma abordagem mais pragmática, baseada na análise e controle dos riscos assumidos em suas decisões. Neste sentido, a empresa que busca maximizar a expectativa de lucro, especifica em valores monetários, um conjunto de restrições sobre as perdas que esta está disposta a incorrer, baseando-se para isso em suas probabilidades de ocorrência. Assim, durante as ultimas quatro décadas, muitas pesquisas e desenvolvimentos foram realizados nesta área, no sentido de se estabelecer medidas de risco que proporcionassem propriedades desejáveis para essa classe de problemas. Desta forma, criou-se um gap entre as duas abordagens, financeira e econômica, as quais possuem raízes em comum: modelar o comportamento de agentes frente ao risco. Assim sendo, esta tese tem três objetivos: (i) propor uma abordagem alternativa para o uso de funções utilidades em problemas de comercialização de energia elétrica multi-período, baseada no valor presente dos equivalentes certos de cada período; (ii) mostrar como tal abordagem pode ser modelada matematicamente e formulada através de um problema de programação linear inteira mista (PLIM) ao considerarmos uma função utilidade linear por partes, e (iii) mostrar a conexão entre a teoria de utilidade e problemas de maximização da renda esperada sujeito a restrições de risco do tipo alfa-CVaR. / [en] In decision under uncertainty problems that depend on multi- period preferences, as the case of trading electricity contracts in Brazil, agents should expresses their inter and intratemporal preferences. The classical economical approach is to define a time separable von Neumann and Morgenstern utility functional. This functional is composed by the sum of the expected utility of each period times an impatience factor that should express the agent`s intertemporal preference. This approach demands the specification of a subjective impatience factor, which should weight utilities units. Due to this subjectiveness and its estimation difficulties, the applied financial groups started to develop more pragmatic approaches based on risk control. In this sense, companies that maximize expected profit will impose constraints on acceptable losses using estimated occurrence probabilities of different outcomes. In this sense, the economical and applied financial approaches have been diverging in the last four decades and, during this time, many studies and developments have been done in the risk metrics field to generate and prove stability and coherence properties for the proposed metrics. This thesis has three main objectives: (i) propose an alternative approach for multi-period decisions problems based on the present value of the certainty equivalent of each period; (ii) show how this approach can be modeled as a mixed integer linear programming problem (MILP) when adopting a piecewise linear utility function; and (iii) provide connections between utility theory and expected maximization problems constrained to alpha-CVaR risk metrics.

La modélisation probabiliste des événements climatiques et environnementaux doit prendre en compte leur nature spatiale. Cette thèse porte sur l’étude de mesures de risque pour des processus spatiaux. Dans une première partie, nous introduisons des mesures de risque à même de prendre en compte la structure de dépendance des processus spatiaux sous-jacents pour traiter de données environnementales. Une deuxième partie est consacrée à l’estimation des paramètres de processus de type max-mélange. La première partie de la thèse est dédiée aux mesures de risque. Nous étendons les travaux réalisés dans [44] d’une part à des processus gaussiens, d’autre part à d’autres processus max-stables et à des processus max-mélange, d’autres structures de dépendance sont ainsi considérées. Les mesures de risque considérées sont basées sur la moyenne L(A,D) de pertes ou de dommages D sur une région d’intérêt A. Nous considérons alors l’espérance et la variance de ces dommages normalisés. Dans un premier temps, nous nous intéressons aux propriétés axiomatiques des mesures de risque, à leur calcul et à leur comportement asymptotique (lorsque la taille de la région A tend vers l’infini). Nous calculons les mesures de risque dans différents cas. Pour un processus gaussien, X, on considère la fonction d’excès : D+ X,u = (X−u)+ où u est un seuil fixé. Pour des processus max-stables et max-mélange X, on considère la fonction puissance : DνX = Xν. Dans certains cas, des formules semi-explicites pour les mesures de risque correspondantes sont données. Une étude sur simulations permet de tester le comportement des mesures de risque par rapport aux nombreux paramètres en jeu et aux différentes formes de noyau de corrélation. Nous évaluons aussi la performance calculatoire des différentes méthodes proposées. Celle-ci est satisfaisante. Enfin, nous avons utilisé une étude précédente sur des données de pollution dans le Piémont italien, celle-ci peuvent être considérées comme gaussiennes. Nous étudions la mesure de risque associée au seuil légal de pollution donnée par la directive européenne 2008/50/EC. Dans une deuxième partie, nous proposons une procédure d’estimation des paramètres d’un processus max-mélange, alternative à la méthode d’estimation par maximum de vraisemblance composite. Cette méthode plus classique d’estimation par maximum de vraisemblance composite est surtout performante pour estimer les paramètres de la partie max-stable du mélange (et moins performante pour estimer les paramètres de la partie asymptotiquement indépendante). Nous proposons une méthode de moindres carrés basée sur le F-madogramme : minimisation de l’écart quadratique entre le F-madogramme théorique et le F-madogramme empirique. Cette méthode est évaluée par simulation et comparée à la méthode par maximum de vraisemblance composite. Les simulations indiquent que la méthode par moindres carrés du F-madogramme est plus performante pour estimer les paramètres de la partie asymptotiquement indépendante / When dealing with environmental or climatic changes, a natural spatial dependence aspect appears. This thesis is dedicated to the study of risk measures in this spatial context. In the first part (Chapters 3 and 4), we study risk measures, which include the natural spatial dependence structure in order to assess the risks due to extreme environmental events and in the last part (Chapter 5), we propose estimation procedures for underlying processes, such as isotropic and stationary max-mixture processes. In the first part dedicated to risk measures, we extended the work in [44] in order to obtain spatial risk measures for various spatial processes and different dependence structures. We based these risk measures on the mean losses over a region A of interest. Risk measures are then defined as the expectation E[L(A,D)] and variance Var(L(A,D)) of the normalized loss. In the study of these measures, we focused on the axiomatic properties of asymptotic behavior (as the size of the region interest goes to infinity) and on computational aspects. We calculated two risk measures: risk measure for the gaussian process based on the damage function called access damage D+ X,u and risk measure for extreme processes based on the power damage function DνX . In simulation study and for each risk measure provided, we emphasized the theoretical results of asymptotic behavior by various parameters of a model and different Kernels for the correlation function. We also evaluated the performance of these risk measures. The results were encouraging. Finally, we implemented the risk measure corresponding to gaussian on the real data of pollution in Piemonte, Italy. We assessed the risks associated with this pollution when an excess of it was over the legal level determined by the European directive 2008/50/EC. With respect to estimation, we proposed a semi-parametric estimation procedure in order to estimate the parameters of a max-mixture model and also of a max-stable model ( inverse max-stable model) as an alternative to composite likelihood. A good estimation by the proposed estimator required the dependence measure to detect all dependence structures in the model, especially when dealing with the max-mixture model. We overcame this challenge by using the F-madogram. The semi-parametric estimation was then based on a quasi least square method, by minimizing the square difference between the theoretical F-madogram and an empirical one. We evaluated the performance of this estimator through a simulation study. It was shown that on a mean, the estimation is performed well, although in some cases, it encountered some difficulties

This thesis deals with selecting the optimal portfolio for a risk averse investor. Firstly, we present the risk measures, specifically spectral risk me- asures which consider an individual risk aversion of the investor. Then we propose a diversification-consistent data envelopment analysis model. The model is searching for an efficient portfolio with respect to second-order sto- chastic dominance. The crux of the thesis is a model based on the theory of multi-criteria optimization and spectral risk measures. The presented mo- del is searching for an optimal portfolio suitable for the investor with a given risk aversion. In addition, the optimal portfolio is also consistent with second- order stochastic dominance efficiency. The topic of the practical part is a nu- merical study in which both models are implemented in MATLAB. Models are applied to a dataset from real financial markets. Personal contribution lies in comparing the diversification-consistent data envelopment analysis model and model based on multi-criteria optimization, both with respect to second order stochastic dominance efficiency.

In this thesis we mainly focused on the usage of the Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR) in risk management and on the pricing of the arithmetic average basket and Asian options in the Black-Scholes framework via a new log-normal sum approximation method. Firstly, we worked on the linearization procedure of the CVaR proposed by Rockafellar and Uryasev. We constructed an optimization problem with the objective of maximizing the expected return under a CVaR constraint. Due to possible intermediate payments we assumed, we had to deal with a re-investment problem which turned the originally one-period problem into a multiperiod one. For solving this multi-period problem, we used the linearization procedure of CVaR and developed an iterative scheme based on linear optimization. Our numerical results obtained from the solution of this problem uncovered some surprising weaknesses of the use of Value-at-Risk (VaR) and CVaR as a risk measure. In the next step, we extended the problem by including the liabilities and the quantile hedging to obtain a reasonable problem construction for managing the liquidity risk. In this problem construction the objective of the investor was assumed to be the maximization of the probability of liquid assets minus liabilities bigger than a threshold level, which is a type of quantile hedging. Since the quantile hedging is not a perfect hedge, a non-zero probability of having a liability value higher than the asset value exists. To control the amount of the probable deficient amount we used a CVaR constraint. In the Black-Scholes framework, the solution of this problem necessitates to deal with the sum of the log-normal distributions. It is known that sum of the log-normal distributions has no closed-form representation. We introduced a new, simple and highly efficient method to approximate the sum of the log-normal distributions using shifted log-normal distributions. The method is based on a limiting approximation of the arithmetic mean by the geometric mean. Using our new approximation method we reduced the quantile hedging problem to a simpler optimization problem. Our new log-normal sum approximation method could also be used to price some options in the Black-Scholes model. With the help of our approximation method we derived closed-form approximation formulas for the prices of the basket and Asian options based on the arithmetic averages. Using our approximation methodology combined with the new analytical pricing formulas for the arithmetic average options, we obtained a very efficient performance for Monte Carlo pricing in a control variate setting. Our numerical results show that our control variate method outperforms the well-known methods from the literature in some cases.

This thesis addresses three topics in the area of statistics and probability, with applications in risk management. First, for the testing problems in the high-dimensional (HD) data analysis, we present a novel method to formulate empirical likelihood tests and jackknife empirical likelihood tests by splitting the sample into subgroups. New tests are constructed to test the equality of two HD means, the coefficient in the HD linear models and the HD covariance matrices. Second, we propose jackknife empirical likelihood methods to formulate interval estimations for important quantities in actuarial science and risk management, such as the risk-distortion measures, Spearman's rho and parametric copulas. Lastly, we introduce the theory of completely mixable (CM) distributions. We give properties of the CM distributions, show that a few classes of distributions are CM and use the new technique to find the bounds for the sum of individual risks with given marginal distributions but unspecific dependence structure. The result partially solves a problem that had been a challenge for decades, and directly leads to the bounds on quantities of interest in risk management, such as the variance, the stop-loss premium, the price of the European options and the Value-at-Risk associated with a joint portfolio.

Syfte: Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur aktivt förvaltade fonder presterar jämfört med indexfonder, när avkastningen har justerats för förvaltningsavgiften. Indexfonden representeras av ett jämförelseindex och studien omfattar en tioårsperiod, 2000-2009. Det faktum att en apa vann aktie SM 1993, framför professionella placerare, visar att aktiekurser är slumpmässiga. Varför ska en investerare då lita på att en förvaltare är bättre på att utvärdera marknaden och dess placeringsmöjligheter än andra? Metod: En kvantitativ metod har använts i uppsatsen, där data har erhållits från Morningstar och SIX Telekurs. Det insamlade materialet har bearbetats i Microsoft Excel för att beräkna fondernas avkastning och prestationsmått. Resultatet har redovisats i tabeller och diagram i empirikapitlet, för att sedan analyseras och jämföras med den teoretiska referensramen. Resultat & slutsats: Endast en av tio aktivt förvaltade fonder överträffar index, därmed dras slutsatsen att indexfonder är ett bättre investeringsalternativ än aktivt förvaltade fonder. Resultatet visar därmed att den högre förvaltningsavgiften som fondbolagen kräver från sina kunder inte är berättigat. Förslag till fortsatt forskning: Baserat på de resultat som kommit fram i uppsatsen, voredet intressant att genomföra en kvalitativ studie där fondförvaltarens åsikter är i fokus. Hur motiveras den höga förvaltningsavgiften, när de inte överträffar index? / Aim: The fact that a monkey won the Swedish Championship in stocks in 1993, ahead of professional investors, shows that stock prices are random. Why should an investor trust that a professional manager is better on evaluating the market and its investment opportunities than others? The purpose with this thesis is to investigate how active managed funds perform compared to index funds, after subtraction of the management fee. The index fund is represented by a “comparison index” and the research covers a period of ten years, between 2000 and 2009. Method: A quantitative method has been used in this study, where the information has been received from Morningstar and SIX Telekurs. Microsoft Excel has been used to process the collected data in order to calculate the expected return and the risk measures. The result is presented in diagrams and charts in order to analyse and compare it with the theory. Result & Conclusions: Only one out of ten active managed funds outperform index,therefore draws the conclusion that index funds is a better investment option than active managed funds. The result shows that the higher management fee that stock exchange companies claims is not appropriate. Suggestions for future research: Based on the results in this thesis, it would be interesting to do a qualitative research where the focus is on the fund managers’ opinions. How can they motivate the high management fee, when they don’t outperform index?

Conic finance is a brand new quantitative finance theory. The thesis is on the applications of conic finance on South African Financial Markets. Conic finance gives a new perspective on the way people should perceive financial markets. Particularly in incomplete markets, where there are non-unique prices and the residual risk is rampant, conic finance plays a crucial role in providing prices that are acceptable at a stress level. The theory assumes that price depends on the direction of trade and there are two prices, one for buying from the market called the ask price and one for selling to the market called the bid price. The bid-ask spread reects the substantial cost of the unhedgeable risk that is present in the market. The hypothesis being considered in this thesis is whether conic finance can reduce the residual risk? Conic finance models bid-ask prices of cashows by applying the theory of acceptability indices to cashows. The theory of acceptability combines elements of arbitrage pricing theory and expected utility theory. Combining the two theories, set of arbitrage opportunities are extended to the set of all opportunities that a wide range of market participants are prepared to accept. The preferences of the market participants are captured by utility functions. The utility functions lead to the concepts of acceptance sets and the associated coherent risk measures. The acceptance sets (market preferences) are modeled using sets of probability measures. The set accepted by all market participants is the intersection of all the sets, which is convex. The size of this set is characterized by an index of acceptabilty. This index of acceptability allows one to speak of cashows acceptable at a level, known as the stress level. The relevant set of probability measures that can value the cashows properly is found through the use of distortion functions. In the first chapter, we introduce the theory of conic finance and build a foundation that leads to the problem and objectives of the thesis. In chapter two, we build on the foundation built in the previous chapter, and we explain in depth the theory of acceptability indices and coherent risk measures. A brief discussion on coherent risk measures is done here since the theory of acceptability indices builds on coherent risk measures. It is also in this chapter, that some new acceptability indices are introduced. In chapter three, focus is shifted to mathematical tools for financial applications. The chapter can be seen as a prerequisite as it bridges the gap from mathematical tools in complete markets to incomplete markets, which is the market that conic finance theory is trying to exploit. As the chapter ends, models used for continuous time modeling and simulations of stochastic processes are presented. In chapter four, the attention is focussed on the numerical methods that are relevant to the thesis. Details on obtaining parameters using the maximum likelihood method and calibrating the parameters to market prices are presented. Next, option pricing by Fourier transform methods is detailed. Finally a discussion on the bid-ask formulas relevant to the thesis is done. Most of the numerical implementations were carried out in Matlab. Chapter five gives an introduction to the world of option trading strategies. Some illustrations are used to try and explain the option trading strategies. Explanations of the possible scenarios at the expiration date for the different option strategies are also included. Chapter six is the appex of the thesis, where results from possible real market scenarios are presented and discussed. Only numerical results were reported on in the thesis. Empirical experiments could not be done due to limitations of availabilty of real market data. The findings from the numerical experiments showed that the spreads from conic finance are reduced. This results in reduced residual risk and reduced low cost of entering into the trading strategies. The thesis ends with formal discussions of the findings in the thesis and some possible directions for further research in chapter seven. / Thesis (MSc (Risk Analysis))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

Conic finance is a brand new quantitative finance theory. The thesis is on the applications of conic finance on South African Financial Markets. Conic finance gives a new perspective on the way people should perceive financial markets. Particularly in incomplete markets, where there are non-unique prices and the residual risk is rampant, conic finance plays a crucial role in providing prices that are acceptable at a stress level. The theory assumes that price depends on the direction of trade and there are two prices, one for buying from the market called the ask price and one for selling to the market called the bid price. The bid-ask spread reects the substantial cost of the unhedgeable risk that is present in the market. The hypothesis being considered in this thesis is whether conic finance can reduce the residual risk? Conic finance models bid-ask prices of cashows by applying the theory of acceptability indices to cashows. The theory of acceptability combines elements of arbitrage pricing theory and expected utility theory. Combining the two theories, set of arbitrage opportunities are extended to the set of all opportunities that a wide range of market participants are prepared to accept. The preferences of the market participants are captured by utility functions. The utility functions lead to the concepts of acceptance sets and the associated coherent risk measures. The acceptance sets (market preferences) are modeled using sets of probability measures. The set accepted by all market participants is the intersection of all the sets, which is convex. The size of this set is characterized by an index of acceptabilty. This index of acceptability allows one to speak of cashows acceptable at a level, known as the stress level. The relevant set of probability measures that can value the cashows properly is found through the use of distortion functions. In the first chapter, we introduce the theory of conic finance and build a foundation that leads to the problem and objectives of the thesis. In chapter two, we build on the foundation built in the previous chapter, and we explain in depth the theory of acceptability indices and coherent risk measures. A brief discussion on coherent risk measures is done here since the theory of acceptability indices builds on coherent risk measures. It is also in this chapter, that some new acceptability indices are introduced. In chapter three, focus is shifted to mathematical tools for financial applications. The chapter can be seen as a prerequisite as it bridges the gap from mathematical tools in complete markets to incomplete markets, which is the market that conic finance theory is trying to exploit. As the chapter ends, models used for continuous time modeling and simulations of stochastic processes are presented. In chapter four, the attention is focussed on the numerical methods that are relevant to the thesis. Details on obtaining parameters using the maximum likelihood method and calibrating the parameters to market prices are presented. Next, option pricing by Fourier transform methods is detailed. Finally a discussion on the bid-ask formulas relevant to the thesis is done. Most of the numerical implementations were carried out in Matlab. Chapter five gives an introduction to the world of option trading strategies. Some illustrations are used to try and explain the option trading strategies. Explanations of the possible scenarios at the expiration date for the different option strategies are also included. Chapter six is the appex of the thesis, where results from possible real market scenarios are presented and discussed. Only numerical results were reported on in the thesis. Empirical experiments could not be done due to limitations of availabilty of real market data. The findings from the numerical experiments showed that the spreads from conic finance are reduced. This results in reduced residual risk and reduced low cost of entering into the trading strategies. The thesis ends with formal discussions of the findings in the thesis and some possible directions for further research in chapter seven. / Thesis (MSc (Risk Analysis))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

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The overall goal of this study was to analyse the welfare effect of improved wastewater treatment with the view of making policy recommendations for sustainable urban and peri-urban irrigation agriculture in Kenya. This goal was achieved by investigating three specific objectives. The first objective was to assess the farmers’ awareness of health risks in urban and peri-urban wastewater irrigation. Second objective was to analyse the factors that affect the choice of low-risk adaptations in reuse of untreated wastewater for irrigation. The third objective was to estimate the value that urban and peri-urban farmers who practice wastewater irrigation impute to improvements in specific characteristics of the wastewater input in agriculture. In order to achieve the first objective, an ordered probit model was used to identify the factors that influence farmers’ awareness of health risks in untreated wastewater irrigation. The model was fitted to data collected from a cross-sectional survey of 317 urban farm households in the Kibera informal settlement of Kenya. Results of this study show that gender of household head, household size, education level of household head, farm size, ownership of the farm, membership to farmers’ group, and market access for the fresh produce significantly affect awareness of farmers about health risks in wastewater irrigation. Therefore, there is need for awareness programs to promote public education through regular training and local workshops on wastewater reuse in order to improve the human capital of the urban and peri-urban farmers. To achieve the second objective, the study used a multinomial logit model to analyse the farmers’ choice of low-risk adaptations in untreated wastewater irrigation. A survey of 317 urban and peri-urban farmers was conducted and measures for risk-reduction in wastewater reuse were analysed. The urban and peri-urban farmers were found to have adopted low-risk wastewater irrigation techniques such as cessation of irrigation before harvesting, crop restriction and safer application methods. Results of the study show that adoption of risk-reduction measures is significantly influenced by the following factors: household size, age of the household head, education of household head, access to extension, access to media, access to credit, farmers’ group membership, and risk awareness. Also, marginal analysis of the coefficients confirmed the socio-economic characteristics are key determinants in adoption of low-risk measures in wastewater reuse. The study recommends that policies in support of low-risk urban and peri-urban irrigation agriculture should disaggregate farmers according to their socio-economic and institutional characteristics in order to achieve their intended objectives. To achieve the third objective, the study employed the discrete choice experiment approach to estimate the benefits farmers impute to improvements in attributes of the wastewater irrigation input, whose aim is to reduce the health risks associated with untreated wastewater irrigation. Urban and peri-urban farmers who practice wastewater irrigation drawn from Motoine-Ngong River in Nairobi were randomly selected for the study. A total of 241 farmers completed the presented choice cards for the choice model estimation. A random parameter logit model was used to estimate the individual level willingness to pay for wastewater treatment. The results show that urban and peri-urban farmers are willing to pay significant monthly municipality taxes for treatment of wastewater. Conclusion of this study was that, quality of treated wastewater, quantity of treated wastewater and the riverine ecosystem restoration are significant factors of preference over policy alternative designs in wastewater treatment and reuse. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Agricultural Economics, Extension and Rural Development / unrestricted