For holdings , let and . Under the investment-consumption arbitrage convention used here, an arbitrage satisfies
The initial consumption is , and the terminal consumption is : there is a possible gain with no external funding and no negative consumption. A pure-investment arbitrage additionally requires . This convention is important because the last part distinguishes initial consumption from pure investment.
Write for holdings of cash, the stock and the European put option, and let be initial consumption. At the given price, , and the three terminal payoffs, in descending order of the stock price, are
Nonnegative terminal payoffs require and . Together with , these imply . If they force , which is not an arbitrage. If , the highest-state payoff is at least , so every such choice is an arbitrage. Consequently the complete set is
The pure-investment arbitrages are exactly the choices :
For example, costs zero and pays .
Let and be the predictable holdings of the stock and the bank account. With no consumption, the self-financing portfolio has and . The Itô product rule, together with the dynamics from part (a), gives
The drift vanishes because and . Thus is a local martingale. It is nonnegative by the assumed nonnegative wealth and strict positivity of , and hence
For example, this last fact follows directly from Conditional Fatou lemma applied to a localizing sequence; the initial capital is assumed finite. As usual, holdings must be integrable against the asset semimartingales for the self-financing portfolio equation to be defined.
Portfolio wealth Created 2026-10-07 Updated 2026-10-14
The value of an investment portfolio, obtained by summing each holding times its current asset price. Consumption removes money from portfolio wealth; a self-financing portfolio changes its value only through asset gains. Nonnegative portfolio wealth is a common admissibility restriction in an investment-consumption problem.
Pure-investment arbitrage 2026-10-05
A pure-investment arbitrage has zero initial cost, no intervening consumption, and a nonnegative terminal payoff that is strictly positive with positive probability.
In singular stochastic control, an unrestricted consumption rate can approximate instantaneous transfers from portfolio wealth into a consumption satisfaction stock. In the relaxed problem a nondecreasing control records these transfers. A transfer decreases portfolio wealth and increases consumption satisfaction by the same amount. Rate controls need not attain the supremum when the relaxed optimum has a jump.
If wealth and consumption are nonnegative, this local martingale is bounded below by minus the finite initial deflated capital. Adding that capital gives a nonnegative local martingale, hence a supermartingale by the Conditional Fatou lemma. Consequently expected discounted consumption cannot exceed initial deflated wealth. The consumption sign and predictable stochastic integrability are part of the hypotheses.
Iteration of the pricing Euler equation gives
The displayed fundamental price follows when the future dividend series is integrable and . Without this dividend-price transversality condition, a deflated price martingale component can survive. For individual holdings, the analogous terminal term is . Telescoping the discrete dividend budget equation gives the initial wealth cost of consumption minus this terminal term; its vanishing is needed for budget equality.
For CRRA utility of a consumption satisfaction stock, jointly scaling initial portfolio wealth, consumption satisfaction and controls gives homogeneity of degree . The value function therefore depends on one dimensionless ratio after factoring out . The effective consumption coefficient becomes .