Handbook of the Fundamentals of Financial Decision Making: In 2 Parts: 4

“This is not the usual collection of important articles published in finance, it is a definite collection that nobody involved in financial-decision making, in particular portfolio management, should be without! First, it is comprehensive in that it deals with all aspects: model building, criterion selection and uncertainty description, but what makes it particularly readable are the easy to follow introductions to each one of the chapters that tie the articles together not only providing an outline of what is to follow but also highlighting the main concepts that will be developed in the follow up sections, either the leading, relevant articles or even some sections that have been specifically written for this handbook.” — Roger J-B Wets, Professor of Mathematics, University of California, Davis

“MacLean and Ziemba have assembled the essential reference work on financial decision making. The contents are tastefully and expertly selected, spanning the field comprehensively from axiomatic foundations to illustrative and useful applications.” — Darrell Duffie, Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance, Stanford University

“This handbook is a good compendium of some of the classic papers on decision making under uncertainty. It would be a useful addition to the library of any financial economist.” —Marti G Subrahmanyam, Charles E Merrill Professor of Finance and Economics, New York University

Volume I is concerned with Decision Making Under Uncertainty. This includes subsections on Arbitrage, Utility Theory, Risk Aversion and Static Portfolio Theory, and Stochastic Dominance. Volume II is concerned with Dynamic Modeling that is the transition for static decision making to multiperiod decision making. The analysis starts with Risk Measures and then discusses Dynamic Portfolio Theory, Tactical Asset Allocation and Asset-Liability Management using Utility and Goal Based Consumption-Investment Decision Models.

A comprehensive set of problems both computational and review and mind expanding with many unsolved problems are in an accompanying problems book. Together the two volumes plus the book of problem forms a very strong set of materials for PhD and Masters courses both as the main or as a supplementary text in financial decision making and portfolio theory. For researchers, it is a valuable resource being an up to date treatment of topics in the classic books on these topics by Johnathan Ingersoll in 1988, and William Ziemba and Raymond Vicksonin in 1975 (updated 2nd edition published in 2006).