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Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Vol. 11 No. 1 1976

Portfolio Selection in a Lognormal Market When the Investor has a Power Utility Function

James A. Ohlson; W. T. Ziemba

Abstract

Multiasset portfolio selection models stated in terms of the expected utility criterion generally require the evaluation of multiple integrals. This reality has severely hindered attempts towards the development of computation methods to determine optimal portfolio allocations when there are a large number of assets. Aside from special cases, expected utility is not convergent into a simple closed form; the complexity from the point of view of computation is then perhaps most easily appreciated if one realizes that every iteration in a nonlinear program demands the estimation of several integrals (see Ziemba [23] for details). Such calculations are extremely costly when the number of assets is large. It is, consequently, of interest to approximate the expected utility function by a function which is easier to optimize over the set of feasible portfolios.

DOI
10.2307/2330229
Volume
11
Issue
1
Pages
57
Sources
openalex crossref

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