Risk Measures and Nonlinear Expectations

Zengjing Chen, Kun He, Reg Kulperger

Department of Mathematics, Donghua University, Shanghai, China.
Department of Statistical and Actuarial Science, The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada.
School of Mathematics, Shandong University, Jinan, China; Department of Financial Engineering, Ajou University, Suwon, Korea.

DOI: 10.4236/jmf.2013.33039                

Abstract

Coherent and convex risk measures, Choquet expectation and Peng’s g-expectation are all generalizations of mathematical expectation. All have been widely used to assess financial riskiness under uncertainty. In this paper, we investigate differences amongst these risk measures and expectations. For this purpose, we constrain our attention of coherent and convex risk measures, and Choquet expectation to the domain of g-expectation. Some differences among coherent and convex risk measures and Choquet expectations are accounted for in the framework of g-expectations. We show that in the family of convex risk measures, only coherent risk measures satisfy Jensen’s inequality. In mathematical finance, risk measures and Choquet expectations are typically used in the pricing of contingent claims over families of measures. The different risk measures will typically yield different pricing. In this paper, we show that the coherent pricing is always less than the corresponding Choquet pricing. This property and inequality fails in general when one uses pricing by convex risk measures. We also discuss the relation between static risk measure and dynamic risk measure in the framework of g-expectations. We show that if g-expectations yield coherent (convex) risk measures then the corresponding conditional g-expectations or equivalently the dynamic risk measure is also coherent (convex). To prove these results, we establish a new converse of the comparison theorem of g-expectations.

Keywords

Risk Measure; Coherent Risk; Convex Risk; Choquet Expectation; g-Expectation; Backward Stochastic Differential Equation; Converse Comparison Theorem; BSDE; Jensen’s Inequality

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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