The term structure of Sharpe ratios and arbitrage-free asset pricing in continuous time

Motivated by financial and empirical arguments and in order to introduce a more flexible methodology of pricing, we provide a new approach to asset pricing based on Backward Volterra equations. The approach relies on an arbitrage-free and incomplete market setting in continuous time by choosing non-unique pricing measures depending either on the time of evaluation or on the maturity of payoffs. We show that in the latter case the dynamics can be captured by a time-delayed backward stochastic Volterra integral equation here introduced which, to the best of our knowledge, has not yet been studied. We then prove an existence and uniqueness result for time-delayed backward stochastic Volterra integral equations. Finally, we present a Lucas-type consumption-based asset pricing model that justifies the emergence of stochastic discount factors matching the term structure of Sharpe ratios.