1 Introduction
As pointed out by Embrechts et al. [
17] and McNeil et al. [
33, Sect. 6.2.1], in financial mathematics and actuarial science, marginal risks and their dependence structure are often modelled separately. While the marginal risks of a
\(d\)-variate risk are identified with probability distributions
\(\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}\) on the real line, the dependence structure is most often modelled by a
\(d\)-variate copula
\(C\). The distribution function
\(F_{\mu}\) of the joint distribution
\(\mu \) is then given by
(1.1)
where
\(F_{\mu _{i}}\) is the distribution function of
\(\mu _{i}\).
In practical applications, quantitative risk managers and actuaries are interested in various aspects
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}(\mu )\) of the joint distribution
\(\mu \) of the individual risks. An important example is
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}=\mathcal{R}_{A_{d}}\) with
$$ {\mathcal{R}}_{A_{d}}(\mu ):=\mathcal{R}(\mu \circ A_{d}^{-1}), $$
(1.2)
where ℛ is the risk functional corresponding to some distribution-invariant ‘downside’ risk measure and
is a fixed Borel-measurable map regarded as an aggregation map in the spirit of McNeil et al. [
33, Sect. 6.2.1]. Standard examples for the aggregation map are
\(A_{d}(x_{1},\dots ,x_{d}) := \sum _{i=1}^{d}x_{i}\) and the three other maps presented in Example
4.4 below. Note that
\(\mu \circ A_{d}^{-1}\) is the distribution of
\(A_{d}(X_{1},\ldots ,X_{d})\) when
\((X_{1},\ldots ,X_{d})\) is a random vector distributed according to
\(\mu \). Therefore
\(\mathcal{R}_{A_{d}}(\mu )\) can be seen as the downside risk of the aggregate position
\(A_{d}(X_{1},\ldots ,X_{d})\).
More generally, one could consider
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}=\mathcal{R}_{\mathfrak{A}_{d}}\) with
$$ {\mathcal{R}}_{\mathfrak{A}_{d}}(\mu ):=\inf \{\mathcal{R}(\mu \circ A_{d}^{-1}) : A_{d}\in \mathfrak{A}_{d} \}=\inf \{\mathcal{R}_{A_{d}}(\mu ) : A_{d} \in \mathfrak{A}_{d} \}, $$
(1.3)
where
\(\mathfrak{A}_{d}\) is a fixed set of Borel-measurable maps
. If there exists an
\(A_{d}^{*}\in \mathfrak{A}_{d}\) at which the infimum in (
1.3) is attained, then
\(\mathcal{R}_{\mathfrak{A}_{d}}(\mu )\) can be seen as the smallest possible risk of a position
\(A_{d}(X_{1},\ldots ,X_{d})\) derived from the single risks
\(X_{1},\ldots ,X_{d}\) with joint distribution
\(\mu \) through a function
\(A_{d}\in \mathfrak{A}_{d}\). It is worth noting that ‘risk’ here does not necessarily mean downside risk, but can also be for instance a mean–downside risk mixture which is the target value in many portfolio optimisation problems. For details, see Sect.
5.2, in particular Remark
5.5.
Of course, there are many other examples for
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}\). One of them is the optimal value in a multi-period portfolio optimisation problem that is addressed in Sect.
6.2. In this example, the role of
\(\mu \) is played by the joint distribution of the relative price changes of the
\(d\) risky assets that are available on the considered financial market.
When starting from separate models for the copula and the marginal distributions, it is reasonable to regard
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}\) as a functional of the copula
\(C\) and the marginal distributions
\(\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}\) via
$$ \mathfrak{T}_{d}(C,\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}):=\mathcal{T}_{d}\Big( \mathfrak{p}_{d}\big(C(F_{\mu _{1}},\ldots ,F_{\mu _{d}})\big)\Big), $$
(1.4)
where
\(\mathfrak{p}_{d}\) assigns to a
\(d\)-variate distribution function its corresponding Borel probability measure on
.
In [
33, Sect. 6.2.1], McNeil et al. point out that practitioners are often required to work only with partial information. For instance, in some situations, it is possible to obtain (sufficient) information on
\(\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}\), but it is much more difficult to obtain information on the dependence structure. Carrying this to the extreme, McNeil et al. assume that
\(\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}\) are fully known and
\(C\) is fully unknown. In this case, one
cannot specify
\(\mathfrak{T}_{d}(C,\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d})\), because
\(C\) is unknown. This leads to the ‘Fréchet problem’ of specifying the range of the map
\(C\mapsto \mathfrak{T}_{d}(C,\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d})\). In the special case where
\(\mathfrak{T}_{d}\) takes values in ℝ, this is often related to finding (sharp) upper and lower bounds for this map. There is a vast literature dealing with this problem; see for instance the works of Rüschendorf [
43], [
44, Chap. 4], Embrechts and Puccetti [
14], Embrechts et al. [
15], Puccetti [
39], Embrechts et al. [
17] and the references cited therein.
In the present paper, a related but different problem is addressed. Still in the case where
\(\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}\) are known (and fixed), assume that
\(\widehat{C}\) is a guess for the true copula
\(C\). It might be based on an expert opinion, a statistical estimation, or the like. Of course, as a guess,
\(\widehat{C}\) can differ from
\(C\). It is clear that a deviation of
\(\widehat{C}\) from
\(C\) can imply a significant difference between
\(\mathfrak{T}_{d}(\widehat{C},\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d})\) and
\(\mathfrak{T}_{d}(C,\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d})\). On the other hand, one might ask whether the difference remains small if the deviation of
\(\widehat{C}\) from
\(C\) is small. This question was raised and answered by Embrechts et al. [
17] in the context of (
1.2) with
\(A_{d}(x_{1},\dots ,x_{d}) := \sum _{i=1}^{d}x_{i}\). Krätschmer et al. [
28, Sect. 4.2.4] took up this concept and generalised the respective result of [
17]. In fact, in the latter two references, continuity of the functional
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}\) at the probability measure
\(\mathfrak{p}_{d}(C(F_{\mu _{1}},\ldots ,F_{\mu _{d}}))\) (with fixed marginal distributions
\(\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}\) having finite
\(p\)th moments) was not considered with respect to a metric on the set of copulas, but with respect to the (relative) weak topology on the set of
\(d\)-variate distributions (with marginal distributions
\(\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}\)). However, it can be seen from Theorem
3.10 below that this is equivalent when the set of copulas is equipped with the supremum distance.
Despite this equivalence, it might be a little more accessible for some readers to measure the difference between two dependence structures directly through the difference between the corresponding copulas, in particular if one starts from separate models for the copula and the marginal distributions. If one follows this approach, one ought to take into account that a
\(d\)-variate distribution
\(\mu \) with fixed marginal distributions
\(\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}\) depends on the copula
\(C\) only through the values that
\(C\) takes on
\(\mathrm{ran}F_{\mu _{1}}\times \cdots \times\mathrm{ran}F_{\mu _{d}}\) (
\(\subseteq [0,1]^{d}\)), where
\(\mathrm{ran}F_{\mu _{i}}\) is the range of
\(F_{\mu _{i}}\). This is apparent from (
1.1) and suggests to measure the distance between copulas (in the considered framework) only on
\(\mathrm{ran}F_{\mu _{1}}\times \cdots \times\mathrm{ran}F_{\mu _{d}}\).
We propose to say that the functional
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}\) underlying
\(\mathfrak{T}_{d}\) (recall Eq. (
1.4)) is
copula robust if for any ‘admissible’ univariate distributions
\(\mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d}\), the map
\(C\mapsto \mathfrak{T}_{d}(C, \mu _{1},\ldots ,\mu _{d})\) is continuous with respect to pointwise (or uniform) convergence on
\(\overline{\mathrm{ran}F_{\mu _{1}}}\times \cdots \times \overline{\mathrm{ran}F_{\mu _{d}}}\), where it is assumed that
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}\) (and thus
\(\mathfrak{T}_{d}\)) takes values in a topological space. By ‘admissible’ we mean that one can find at least one copula
\(C\) such that the probability measure
\(\mathfrak{p}_{d}(C(F_{\mu _{1}},\ldots ,F_{\mu _{d}}))\) is contained in the domain of
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}\). The precise definition of copula robustness is given in Sect.
3. The required notation and terminology as well as some auxiliary results are given before in Sect.
2. It is worth mentioning that Theorem
2.3 provides a generalisation of Deheuvels’ [
10] copula convergence theorem and that Corollary
2.9 provides a characterisation of weak convergence in Fréchet classes of
\(d\)-variate distributions.
In the second part of the paper, we discuss three examples for copula robust functionals
\(\mathcal{T}_{d}\). First, in Sect.
4, we address the quantification of the ‘downside risk’ of aggregate financial positions. It will be seen that the functional in (
1.2) is copula robust under mild assumptions (Sect.
4.2). The relation of copula robustness to the concept of aggregation robustness of Embrechts et al. [
17] (Sect.
4.3) as well as copula robustness of inf-convolution functionals (Sect.
4.4) are also discussed in detail. Second, in Sect.
5, we address stochastic programming problems. It can be inferred from results of Claus et al. [
9] that the optimal value of a general stochastic programming problem depends copula robustly on the distribution of the underlying
\(d\)-variate input random variable
\(Z\). This covers in particular classical one-period portfolio optimisation problems (where the role of
\(Z\) is played by the vector of the relative price changes of
\(d\) risky assets) and therefore backs in a way a hypothesis of Saida and Prigent [
45]. In [
45, Sect. 1], they conclude from their numerical investigations that
‘investors must more take care of the specification of the marginal distribution than of the copula function’. Third, in Sect.
6, we address multi-period portfolio optimisation problems and derive results that are similar to those in the one-period case. The main tool in this context is Theorem
6.2 which is a variant of a result of Müller [
35] about the continuous dependence of the value function on the transition function in a Markov decision model. Theorem
6.2 is of independent interest and contributes to the general theory of Markov decision processes.
Throughout this paper,
\(|\cdot |\) denotes any norm on
and
\(\langle \,\cdot \,,\,\cdot \,\rangle \) is the Euclidean scalar product defined by
\(\langle x,y\rangle :=\sum _{i=1}^{d}x_{i}y_{i}\) for any elements
\(x=(x_{1},\ldots ,x_{d})\) and
\(y=(y_{1},\ldots ,y_{d})\) of
. Moreover, we set
and
. The proofs of all results can be found in Appendix
A.
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