Portfolio reshaping under 1st order stochastic dominance constraints by the exact penalty function methods

Abstract

The paper addresses general constrained and non-linear optimization problems. For some of these notoriously hard problems, there exists a reformulation as an unconstrained, global optimization problem. We illustrate the transformation, and the performance of the reformulation for a non-linear problem in stochastic optimization. The problem is adapted from portfolio optimization with first order stochastic dominance constraints.