We analyze the optimal hedging policy of a firm that has flexibility in the timing of investment, but faces a constraint on its ability to raise external funds. By reducing the risk that the firm's ability to finance investment will disappear, hedging restores its timing flexibility and thus raises the payoff threshold required to justify investment. The principal implication of this result is ...

In view of the recent documented hedging bias attributable to failing to accommodate volatility long memory, we suggest to use the simple, yet superior, realized variancecovariance (RVCOV) in dynamic hedging. For its incremental value from intradaily information, model-free and inherent long memory, RVCOV has been shown to be accurate without misspecification bias and easily generalized to high...

Organisms use various strategies to cope with fluctuating environmental conditions. In diversified bet-hedging, a single genotype exhibits phenotypic heterogeneity with the expectation that some individuals will survive transient selective pressures. To date, empirical evidence for bet-hedging is scarce. Here, we observe that individual Drosophila melanogaster flies exhibit striking variation i...

Microorganisms can facilitate their survival in stressful environments by entering a state of metabolic inactivity or dormancy. However, this state impairs the function of the very sensory systems necessary to detect favorable growth conditions. Thus, how can a metabolically quiescent cell accurately monitor environmental conditions in order to best decide when to exit dormancy? One strategy em...

Customized electric power contracts catering to specific business and risk management needs have gained increasing popularity among large energy firms in the restructured electricity industry. A tolling agreement (or, tolling contact) is one such example in which a contract buyer reserves the right to take the output of an underlying electricity generation asset by paying a predetermined premiu...

This paper explores the merits of hedging stochastic input costs (i.e., reducing the risk of adverse changes in costs) in a decentralized, risk neutral supply chain. Specifically, we consider a generalized version of the well-known ‘selling-to-the-newsvendor’ model in which both the upstream and the downstream firms face stochastic input costs. The firms’ operations are intertwined – i.e., the ...

This paper proposes a swarm intelligence long-term hedging tool to support electricity producers in competitive electricity markets. This tool investigates the long-term hedging opportunities available to electric power producers through the use of contracts with physical (spot and forward) and financial (options) settlement. To find the optimal portfolio the producer risk preference is stated ...

We propose a new method for pricing options based on GARCH models with filtered historical innovations. In an incomplete market framework we allow for different distributions of the historical and the pricing return dynamics enhancing the model flexibility to fit market option prices. An extensive empirical analysis based on S&P 500 index options shows that our model outperforms other competing...

This article attempts to extend the complete market option pricing theory to incomplete markets. Instead of eliminating the risk by a perfect hedging portfolio, partial hedging will be adopted and some residual risk at expiration will be tolerated. The risk measure (or risk indifference) prices charged for buying or selling an option are associated to the capital required for dynamic hedging so...