Classical mean-variance model revisited: pseudo efficiency

Investigating the inverse problem of the classical Markowitz mean-variance formulation: Given a mean-variance pair, find initial investment levels and their corresponding portfolio policies such that the given mean-variance pair can be realized, we reveal that any mean-variance pair inside the reachable region can be achieved by multiple portfolio policies associated with different initial investment levels. Therefore, in the mean-variance world for a market of all risky assets, the common belief of monotonicity: ‘The larger you invest, the larger expected future wealth you can expect for a given risk (variance) level’ does not hold, which stimulates us to extend the classical two-objective mean-variance framework to an expanded three-objective framework: to maximize the mean and minimize the variance of the final wealth as well as to minimize the initial investment level. As a result, we eliminate from the policy candidate list the set of pseudo efficient policies that are efficient in the original mean-variance space, but inefficient in this newly introduced three-dimensional objective space.