Speaker: Jose Figueroa-Lopez, Purdue University
ABSTRACT
We consider the problem of maximizing expected utility from terminal wealth for a power investor who can allocate his wealth in a stock, a defaultable security, and a money market account. The dynamics of these security prices are governed by geometric Brownian motions modulated by a hidden continuous time finite state Markov chain. We reduce the partially observed stochastic control problem to a complete observation control problem via the filtered regime switching probabilities. We separate the latter into a pre-default and a post-default dynamic optimization subproblems, and obtain two coupled Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) partial differential equations. We prove existence and uniqueness of a globally bounded classical solution to the pre-default HJB equation, and give a verification theorem characterizing each value function as the solution of the corresponding HJB equation. This is joint work with Agostino Capponi and Andrea Pascucci.