A general duality relation with applications in quantitative risk management

A fundamental problem in risk management is the robust aggregation of different sources of risk in a situation where little or no data are available to infer information about their dependencies. A popular approach to solving this problem is to formulate an optimization problem under which one maximizes a risk measure over all multivariate distributions that are consistent with the available data. In several special cases of such models, there exist dual problems that are easier to solve or approximate, yielding robust bounds on the aggregated risk. In this chapter we formulate a general optimization problem, which can be seen as a doubly infinite linear programming problem, and we show that the associated dual generalizes several well known special cases and extends to new risk management models we propose