A continuous selection for optimal portfolios under convex risk measures does not always exist

Abstract: One of the crucial problems in mathematical finance is to mitigate the risk of a financial position by setting up hedging positions of eligible financial securities. This leads to focusing on set-valued maps associating to any financial position the set of those eligible payoffs that reduce the risk of the position to a target acceptable level at the lowest possible cost. Among other properties of such maps, the ability to ensure lower semicontinuity and continuous selections is key from an operational perspective. It is known that lower semicontinuity generally fails in an infinite-dimensional setting. In this note we show that neither lower semicontinuity nor, more surprisingly, the existence of continuous selections can be a priori guaranteed even in a finite-dimensional setting. In particular, this failure is possible under arbitrage-free markets and convex risk measures.