Related papers: On the value of being American
The price of a stock will rarely follow the assumed model and a curious investor or a Regulatory Authority may wish to obtain a probability model the prices support. A risk neutral probability ${\cal P}^*$ for the stock's price at time $T$…
The value of an American option is the maximized value of the discounted cash flows from the option. At each time step, one needs to compare the immediate exercise value with the continuation value and decide to exercise as soon as the…
We study perpetual American option pricing problems in an extension of the Black-Merton-Scholes model in which the dividend and volatility rates of the underlying risky asset depend on the running values of its maximum and maximum drawdown.…
In this paper, we study a version of the perpetual American call/put option where exercise opportunities arrive only periodically. Focusing on the exponential L\'evy models with i.i.d. exponentially-distributed exercise intervals, we show…
We consider a general local-stochastic volatility model and an investor with exponential utility. For a European-style contingent claim, whose payoff may depend on either a traded or non-traded asset, we derive an explicit approximation for…
We present a novel method for the numerical pricing of American options based on Monte Carlo simulation and the optimization of exercise strategies. Previous solutions to this problem either explicitly or implicitly determine so-called…
In the first part of this thesis, we focus on American options in the Heston model. We first give an analytical characterization of the value function of an American option as the unique solution of the associated (degenerate) parabolic…
We consider a portfolio with call option and the corresponding underlying asset under the standard assumption that stock-market price represents a random variable with lognormal distribution. Minimizing the variance (hedging risk) of the…
This paper starts by defining the criteria where the early-exercise of an American option is never optimal, under positive, or negative rates. It follows with a short analysis of the various shapes of the exercise region under negative…
We consider the problem of computing upper and lower bounds on the price of a European basket call option, given prices on other similar baskets. Although this problem is very hard to solve exactly in the general case, we show that in some…
We present an adaptive approach for valuing the European call option on assets with stochastic volatility. The essential feature of the method is a reduction of uncertainty in latent volatility due to a Bayesian learning procedure. Starting…
In this paper, we combine modern portfolio theory and option pricing theory so that a trader who takes a position in a European option contract and the underlying assets can construct an optimal portfolio such that at the moment of the…
A statistical decision problem is hidden in the core of option pricing. A simple form for the price C of a European call option is obtained via the minimum Bayes risk, R_B, of a 2-parameter estimation problem, thus justifying calling C…
We consider a discrete-time incomplete multi-asset market model with continuous price jumps. For a wide class of contingent claims, including European basket call options, we compute the bounds of the interval containing the no-arbitrage…
We give an analytical characterization of the price function of an American option in Heston-type models. Our approach is based on variational inequalities and extends recent results of Daskalopoulos and Feehan (2011). We study the…
We study the range of prices at which a rational agent should contemplate transacting a financial contract outside a given securities market. Trading is subject to nonproportional transaction costs and portfolio constraints and full…
We present three models of stock price with time-dependent interest rate, dividend yield, and volatility, respectively, that allow for explicit forms of the optimal exercise boundary of the finite maturity American put option. The optimal…
This paper formulates a model of utility for a continuous time framework that captures the decision-maker's concern with ambiguity about both volatility and drift. Corresponding extensions of some basic results in asset pricing theory are…
We propose a versatile Monte-Carlo method for pricing and hedging options when the market is incomplete, for an arbitrary risk criterion (chosen here to be the expected shortfall), for a large class of stochastic processes, and in the…
We consider model-free pricing of digital options, which pay out if the underlying asset has crossed both upper and lower barriers. We make only weak assumptions about the underlying process (typically continuity), but assume that the…