On Pre-Commitment Aspects of a Time-Consistent Strategy for a Mean-Variance Investor

Abstract

In this paper, a link between a time-consistent and a pre-commitment investment strategy is established. We define an implied investment target, which is implicitly contained in a time-consistent strategy at a given time step and wealth level. By imposing the implied investment target at the initial time step on a time-consistent strategy, we form a hybrid strategy which may generate better mean-variance efficient frontiers than the time-consistent strategy. We extend the numerical algorithm proposed in Cong and Oosterlee (2016b) to solve constrained time-consistent mean-variance optimization problems. Since the time-consistent and the pre-commitment strategies generate different terminal wealth distributions, time-consistency is not always inferior to pre-commitment.