A Unified Model of Investor Utility and Asset Pricing

This article develops a new and intuitive expression of investor utility. It starts with an empirical test of a general valuation model applied to three popular publicly traded market composites. The experiment compares the price estimates of the model to a traditional model that reflects mean-variance efficiency. Thereafter, we formally justify the usage of the proposed model. Its derivation is based on maximizing the logarithm of investor wealth. In contrast to prior work with a similar premise, we explicitly incorporate the investor time horizon, discretionary consumption, and potential investor default to determine loss aversion. We treat both borrowing and future expenditure as leverage. The resulting utility objective is finally directly transformed into a valuation model. The model is not limited to a specific probability distribution of asset returns. Although it conforms to markets where no-arbitrage conditions exist, it does not require such conditions. This makes it suitable for the valuation of illiquid assets, like private equity and private credit.