Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2008/iii/paper-40/1/a/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 40 1 a Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Put , assuming , and letThis state-price density prices the bank account and the risky asset. The Itô formula givesNonnegative wealth and consumption make the deflated cumulative gains a nonnegative local martingale, hence a supermartingale. Every admissible consumption stream therefore satisfies the state-price budget constraint .
Write for the inverse marginal utility. The Inada conditions make decreasing from infinity to zero. A positive Lagrange multiplier for the budget gives the pointwise condition . Thus, whenever a finite optimum exists and a multiplier exhausts the budget,The concave supporting-tangent inequality, integrated against the budget, proves optimality. These curvature and endpoint assumptions alone do not ensure that the infinite-horizon value is finite; part (b) gives the exact additional condition for power utility.
The optimal wealth is the conditional price of remaining consumption:It is nonnegative. Apply the Martingale representation theorem to the integrable total discounted consumption claim:Comparing with the deflated wealth equation yieldsThis constructs the portfolio without assuming extra smoothness of the value function. If the stationary value is twice differentiable with , optimization of its Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation instead gives and .
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