Single-Period Portfolio Selection via Information Projection

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Hauptverfasser: Yang, Bo-Yu, Gastpar, Michael
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Yang, Bo-Yu
Gastpar, Michael
author_facet Yang, Bo-Yu
Gastpar, Michael
contents We study the single-period portfolio selection problem under Constant Relative Risk-Aversion (CRRA) utility through the information-theoretic lens. Assuming only that the market payoff vector has finite support, we show that the Certainty-Equivalent (CE) growth rate under CRRA utility can be decomposed into a portfolio-induced Rényi divergence term, a Rényi entropy term of the risk-tilted market law, and a log-partition term. In this setting, the Rényi order has a clear operational meaning: it exactly coincides with the investor's coefficient of relative risk aversion. We further show that CRRA portfolio selection is equivalent to a Rényi information-projection problem. Using a variational representation of Rényi divergence, we obtain a Blahut-Arimoto-style alternating optimization with a closed-form auxiliary update and a KL-type portfolio step. In the low risk-aversion regime, this method empirically requires fewer iterations than both direct CRRA utility optimization and Cover's method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_03184
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Single-Period Portfolio Selection via Information Projection
Yang, Bo-Yu
Gastpar, Michael
Information Theory
Mathematical Finance
Portfolio Management
We study the single-period portfolio selection problem under Constant Relative Risk-Aversion (CRRA) utility through the information-theoretic lens. Assuming only that the market payoff vector has finite support, we show that the Certainty-Equivalent (CE) growth rate under CRRA utility can be decomposed into a portfolio-induced Rényi divergence term, a Rényi entropy term of the risk-tilted market law, and a log-partition term. In this setting, the Rényi order has a clear operational meaning: it exactly coincides with the investor's coefficient of relative risk aversion. We further show that CRRA portfolio selection is equivalent to a Rényi information-projection problem. Using a variational representation of Rényi divergence, we obtain a Blahut-Arimoto-style alternating optimization with a closed-form auxiliary update and a KL-type portfolio step. In the low risk-aversion regime, this method empirically requires fewer iterations than both direct CRRA utility optimization and Cover's method.
title Single-Period Portfolio Selection via Information Projection
topic Information Theory
Mathematical Finance
Portfolio Management
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03184