Optimal Asset Liquidation with Multiplicative Transient Price Impact

Abstract

We study a multiplicative transient price impact model for an illiquid financial market, where trading causes price impact which is multiplicative in relation to the current price, transient over time with finite rate of resilience, and non-linear in the order size. We construct explicit solutions for the optimal control and the value function of singular optimal control problems to maximize expected discounted proceeds from liquidating a given asset position. A free boundary problem, describing the optimal control, is solved for two variants of the problem where admissible controls are monotone or of bounded variation.