Treat each column as the payoff from one unit of initial investment, so the cost of holdings is . The first asset weakly dominates the third at the same price, and so does the second. Long the first and short the third gives zero initial cost and terminal payoff . Long the second and short the third gives payoff , also at zero cost. These are arbitrages provided the displayed states have positive probability. Combining them gives the zero-cost position with payoff .
More generally, imposing zero cost means , and its payoff is . Thus every with at least one positive gives a pure-investment arbitrage. The market is not arbitrage-free.
There is nevertheless no arbitrage of the other requested kind, with every future net cash flow identically zero. Indeed the middle-state payoff is , so a zero terminal payoff already forces zero initial cost. The other two states then force , hence . Equivalently, the return matrix has determinant and is invertible. Therefore
The unique vector pricing the three unit-investment payoffs is . It is nonnegative but not strictly positive. This illustrates why nonnegative state prices need not exclude arbitrage: strictly positive state prices would assign positive cost to either of the nonzero nonnegative payoffs above.
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 .