Law invariant risk measures have the Fatou property

Abstract

S. Kusuoka [K01, Theorem 4] gave an interesting dual characterization of law invariant coherent risk measures, satisfying the Fatou property. The latter property was introduced by F. Delbaen [D 02]. In the present note we extend Kusuoka’s characterization in two directions, the first one being rather standard, while the second one is somewhat surprising. Firstly we generalize — similarly as M. Fritelli and E. Rossaza Gianin [FG 05] — from the notion of coherent risk measures to the more general notion of convex risk measures as introduced by H. Föllmer and A. Schied [FS 04]. Secondly — and more importantly — we show that the hypothesis of Fatou property may actually be dropped as it is automatically implied by the hypothesis of law invariance.

We also introduce the notion of the Lebesgue property of a convex risk measure, where the inequality in the definition of the Fatou property is replaced by an equality, and give some dual characterizations of this property.

We thank S. Kusuoka, P. Orihuela and A. Schied for their advise and help in preparing this paper.

Financial support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under the grant P15889 and from Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) under Grant MA 13 is gratefully acknowledged.