Optimal Risk-Averse Timing of an Asset Sale: Trending vs Mean-Reverting Price Dynamics

Tim Leung and Zheng Wang

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper studies the optimal risk-averse timing to sell a risky asset. The investor's risk preference is described by the exponential, power, or log utility. Two stochastic models are considered for the asset price -- the geometric Brownian motion and exponential Ornstein-Uhlenbeck models -- to account for, respectively, the trending and mean-reverting price dynamics. In all cases, we derive the optimal thresholds and certainty equivalents to sell the asset, and compare them across models and utilities, with emphasis on their dependence on asset price, risk aversion, and quantity. We find that the timing option may render the investor's value function and certainty equivalent non-concave in price. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the investor's strategies and the premium associated with optimally timing to sell.

Date: 2016-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08143 Latest version (application/pdf)

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:arx:papers:1610.08143

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().