English

Tail Option Pricing Under Power Laws

Pricing of Securities 2023-03-21 v3

Abstract

We build a methodology that takes a given option price in the tails with strike KK and extends (for calls, all strikes > KK, for puts all strikes <K< K) assuming the continuation falls into what we define as "Karamata Constant" over which the strong Pareto law holds. The heuristic produces relative prices for options, with for sole parameter the tail index α\alpha, under some mild arbitrage constraints. Usual restrictions such as finiteness of variance are not required. The methodology allows us to scrutinize the volatility surface and test various theories of relative tail option overpricing (usually built on thin tailed models and minor modifications/fudging of the Black-Scholes formula).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.02347,
  title  = {Tail Option Pricing Under Power Laws},
  author = {Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Brandon Yarckin and Chitpuneet Mann and Damir Delic and Mark Spitznagel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.02347},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:41:27.061Z