We consider the problem of utility maximization for small traders on incomplete
financial markets. As opposed to most of the papers dealing with this
subject, the investors’ trading strategies we allow underly constraints described
by closed, but not necessarily convex, sets. The final wealths obtained by trading
under these constraints are identified as stochastic processes which usually are
supermartingales, and even martingales for particular strategies. These strategies
are seen to be optimal, and the corresponding value functions determined
simply by the initial values of the supermartingales. We separately treat the
cases of exponential, power and logarithmic utility.
We consider financial markets with agents exposed to an external source of
risk which cannot be hedged through investments on the capital market alone.
The sources of risk we think of may be weather and climate. Therefore we face
a typical example of an incomplete financial market. We design a model of a
market on which the external risk becomes tradable. In a first step we complete
the market by introducing an extra security which valuates the external risk
through a process parameter describing its market price. If this parameter is
fixed, risk has a price and every agent can maximize the expected exponential
utility with individual risk aversion obtained from his risk exposure on the one
hand and his investment into the financial market consisting of an exogenous set
of stocks and the insurance asset on the other hand. In the second step, the
market price of risk parameter has to be determined by a partial equilibrium
condition which just expresses the fact that in equilibrium the market is cleared
of the second security. This choice of market price of risk is performed in the
framework of nonlinear backwards stochastic differential equations.