Статьи

The effects of risk and uncertainty upon asset prices, upon rational decision rules for individuals and institutions to use in selecting security portfolios, and upon the proper selection of projects to include in corporate capital budgets have increasingly engaged the attention of professional economists and other students of the capital markets and of business finance in recent years. The first two sections of this paper deal with the problem of selecting optimal security portfolios by risk-averse investors who have the alternative of investing in risk-free securities with a positive return (or borrowing at the same rate of interest) and who can self short if whey wish. In section III we develop various significant equilibrium properties within the risk asset portfolio. However unceelisic the latter assumption may be, it enables, in section IV, to derive a set of (stable) equilibrium market prices which at least fully and explicity reflect the presence of uncertainty per se (as distinct from the effects of diverse expectations), and to derive further implications of such uncertainty. The next section considers some of the implications of these results for the normative aspects of the capital budgeting decisions of a company whose stock is traded in the market. The final section of the paper briefly examines the complications introduced by institutional limits on amounts which either individuals or corporations may borrow at given rates, by rising costs of borrowed funds, and certain other "real world" complications.