The choice of admissible trading strategies in mathematical modelling of financial markets is a delicate issue, going back to Harrison and Kreps (1979). In the context of optimal portfolio selection with expected utility preferences this question has been a focus of considerable attention over the last twenty years. We propose a novel notion of admissibility that has many pleasant features -- admissibility is characterized purely under the objective measure P ; the wealth of any admissible strategy is a supermartingale under all pricing measures; local boundedness of the price process is not required; neither strict monotonicity, strict concavity nor differentiability of the utility function are necessary; the definition encompasses both the classical mean-variance preferences and the monotone expected utility. For utility functions finite on the  real line, our class represents a minimal set containing simple strategies which also contains the optimizer, under conditions that are substantially milder than the celebrated reasonable asymptotic elasticity condition on the utility function . In particular, no condition on the behavior of the utility at -\infty is needed .
The choice of admissible trading strategies in mathematical modelling of financial markets is a delicate issue, going back to Harrison and Kreps (1979). In the context of optimal portfolio selection with expected utility preferences this question has been a focus of considerable attention over the last twenty years. We propose a novel notion of admissibility that has many pleasant features - admissibility is characterized purely under the objective measure ; the wealth of any admissible strategy is a supermartingale under all pricing measures; local boundedness of the price process is not required; neither strict monotonicity, strict concavity nor differentiability of the utility function are necessary; the definition encompasses both the classical mean-variance preferences and the monotone expected utility. For utility functions finite on the whole real line, our class represents a minimal set containing simple strategies which also contains the optimizer, under conditions that are milder than the celebrated reasonable asymptotic elasticity condition on the utility function .
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. In particular, no condition on the behavior of the utility at -\infty is needed