Time consistent vs. time inconsistent dynamic asset allocation: Some utility cost calculations for mean variance preferences

Abraham Lioui ()

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2013, vol. 37, issue 5, 1066-1096

Abstract: We solve for the time consistent dynamic asset allocation of an investor with a mean variance objective function in a multiple assets affine setting. We use as a benchmark the pre-commitment strategy widely used in the literature and assess the potential welfare gains from pre-commitment by comparing the time consistent strategy to the pre-commitment, time inconsistent, strategy. The gains from pre-commitment are simply considerable since, in some cases, at the 5 years horizon the yearly certainty equivalent of the pre-commitment strategy is 48% compared with 9% for the time consistent strategy. However, these welfare gains result from huge and unrealistic positions in the risky assets; in some cases, the pre-commitment strategy is more than 60 times the time consistent strategy. We thus looked for alternative time inconsistent strategies that improve relative to the time consistent strategy while still involving reasonable risky asset positions. To identify these strategies, we explore an original aspect of the time consistent mean variance strategy: the presence of intertemporal hedging in such a strategy reflects welfare degradation. Therefore, a natural candidate is the time consistent strategy without the intertemporal hedging component. The second component of the time consistent strategy is the traditional myopic component discounted. We show that this component could be seen as a standard myopic strategy which is marked to market and the discount factor acts as a tailing factor. This marked to market myopic (MMM) strategy is shown to yield reasonable risky assets positions and substantial welfare gains at long horizons relative to the time consistent strategy. We also show that it dominates the standard myopic strategy as well as the equally weighted strategy.

Keywords: Mean-variance preferences; Dynamic asset allocation; Intertemporal hedging; Predictability; Value and growth investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D12 G11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165188913000158
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:dyncon:v:37:y:2013:i:5:p:1066-1096

DOI: 10.1016/j.jedc.2013.01.007

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control is currently edited by J. Bullard, C. Chiarella, H. Dawid, C. H. Hommes, P. Klein and C. Otrok

More articles in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().