English

Some remarks on first passage of Levy processes, the American put and pasting principles

Probability 2008-12-02 v1 Pricing of Securities

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to provide, with the help of a fluctuation identity, a generic link between a number of known identities for the first passage time and overshoot above/below a fixed level of a Levy process and the solution of Gerber and Shiu [Astin Bull. 24 (1994) 195-220], Boyarchenko and Levendorskii [Working paper series EERS 98/02 (1998), Unpublished manuscript (1999), SIAM J. Control Optim. 40 (2002) 1663-1696], Chan [Original unpublished manuscript (2000)], Avram, Chan and Usabel [Stochastic Process. Appl. 100 (2002) 75-107], Mordecki [Finance Stoch. 6 (2002) 473-493], Asmussen, Avram and Pistorius [Stochastic Process. Appl. 109 (2004) 79-111] and Chesney and Jeanblanc [Appl. Math. Fin. 11 (2004) 207-225] to the American perpetual put optimal stopping problem. Furthermore, we make folklore precise and give necessary and sufficient conditions for smooth pasting to occur in the considered problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.math/0508487,
  title  = {Some remarks on first passage of Levy processes, the American put and pasting principles},
  author = {L. Alili and A. E. Kyprianou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:math/0508487},
  year   = {2008}
}

Comments

Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/105051605000000377 in the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)