Investment choices: Indivisible non-marketable assets and suboptimal solutions

Several investment decisions deal with non-marketable assets. Non-marketable assets are available only to one investor and are often indivisible. This has relevant consequences on investor investment opportunities. Adhering to a mean–variance representation of the investment space and considering a non-marketable asset (divisible or not), we derive some possible investment scenarios an investor may face. Furthermore, we show how a limited ability to gather and process information affects investor portfolio choices. Our results define a set of conditions under which the non-marketable asset represents a good investment and show that, under certain assumptions, the efficient frontier exhibits non-linearities and intervals of discontinuity.