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We study the analyticity of the value function in optimal investment with expected utility from terminal wealth and the relation to stochastically dominant financial models. We identify both a class of utilities and a class of semimartingale models for which we establish analyticity. Specifically, these utilities have completely monotonic inverse marginals, while the market models have a maximal element in the sense of infinite-order stochastic dominance. We construct two counterexamples, themselves of independent interest, which show that analyticity fails if either the utility or the market model does not belong to the respective special class. We also provide explicit formulas for the derivatives of all orders of the value functions as well as their optimizers. Finally, we show that for the set of supermartingale deflators, stochastic dominance of infinite order is equivalent to the apparently stronger dominance of second order. 

We study the response of the optimal investment problem to small changes of the stock price dynamics. Starting with a multidimensional semimartingale setting of an incomplete market, we suppose that the perturbation process is also a general semimartingale. We obtain second-order expansions of the value functions, first-order corrections to the optimisers, and provide the adjustments to the optimal control that match the objective function up to the second order. We also give a characterisation in terms of the risk-tolerance wealth process, if it exists, by reducing the problem to the Kunita–Watanabe decomposition under a change of measure and numéraire. Finally, we illustrate the results by examples of base models that allow closed-form solutions, but where this structure is lost under perturbations of the model where our results allow an approximate solution.