Risk-neutral Measure - Motivating The Use of Risk-neutral Measures

Motivating The Use of Risk-neutral Measures

Prices of assets depend crucially on their risk as investors typically demand more profit for bearing more uncertainty. Therefore, today's price of a claim on a risky amount realised tomorrow will generally differ from its expected value. Most commonly, investors are risk-averse and today's price is below the expectation, remunerating those who bear the risk.

To price assets, consequently, the calculated expected values need to be adjusted for an investor's risk preferences (see also Sharpe ratio). Unfortunately, the discounted rates would vary between investors and an individual's risk preference is difficult to quantify.

It turns out that in a complete market with no arbitrage opportunities there is an alternative way to do this calculation: Instead of first taking the expectation and then adjusting for an investor's risk preference, one can adjust, once and for all, the probabilities of future outcomes such that they incorporate all investors' risk premia, and then take the expectation under this new probability distribution, the risk-neutral measure. The main benefit stems from the fact that once the risk-neutral probabilities are found, every asset can be priced by simply taking its expected payoff. Note that if we used the actual real-world probabilities, every security would require a different adjustment (as they differ in riskiness).

The lack of arbitrage is crucial for existence of a risk-neutral measure. In fact, by the fundamental theorem of asset pricing, the condition of no-arbitrage is equivalent to the existence of a risk-neutral measure. Completeness of the market is also important because in an incomplete market there are a multitude of possible prices for an asset corresponding to different risk-neutral measures. It is usual to argue that market efficiency implies that there is only one price (the "law of one price"); the correct risk-neutral measure to price with must be selected using economic, rather than purely mathematical, arguments.

A common mistake is to confuse the constructed probability distribution with the real-world probability. They will be different because in the real-world, investors demand risk premia, whereas it can be shown that under the risk-neutral probabilities all assets have the same expected rate of return, the risk-free rate (or short rate) and thus do not incorporate any such premia. The method of risk-neutral pricing should be considered as many other useful computational tools -- convenient and powerful, even if seemingly artificial.