Optimal consumption of a divisible durable good

We examine the intertemporal optimal consumption and investment problem in a continuous-time economy with a divisible durable good. Consumption services are assumed to be proportional to the stock of the good held and adjustment of the stock is costly, in that it involves the payment of a proportional transaction cost. For the case in which the investor has an isoelastic utility function and asset prices follow a geometric Brownian motion, we establish the existence of an optimal policy and provide an explicit representation for the value function. We show that the investor acts so as to maintain the ratio of the stock of the durable to total wealth in a fixed (nonstochastic) range and that the optimal investment policy involves stochastic portfolio weights. The dependence of the optimal policies on the parameters of the model is also discussed. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.