Mathematical Finance Seminar
Date
Time
17:15
Location
HUB; RUD 25; 1.115
Alex Tse (University College London)
Portfolio Selection in Contests
In an investment contest with incomplete information, a finite number of agents dynamically trade assets with idiosyncratic risk and are rewarded based on the relative ranking of their terminal portfolio values. We explicitly characterize a symmetric Nash equilibrium of the contest and rigorously verify its uniqueness. The connection between the reward structure and the agents’ portfolio strategies is examined. A top-heavy payout rule results in an equilibrium portfolio return distribution with high positive skewness, which suffers from a large likelihood of poor performance. Risky asset holding increases when competition intensifies in a winner-takes all contest. This is joint work with Yumin Lu.