Semiparametric bounds of mean and variance for exotic options

Finding semiparametric bounds for option prices is a widely studied pricing technique. We obtain closed-form semiparametric bounds of the mean and variance for the pay-off of two exotic (Collar and Gap) call options given mean and variance information on the underlying asset price. Mathematically, we extended domination technique by quadratic functions to bound mean and variances. This work was supported by National Science Foundation of the United States (Grant Nos. DMS-0720977 and DMS-0805929)     

Equilibrium pricing bounds on option prices

We consider the problem of valuing European options in a complete market but with incomplete data. Typically, when the underlying asset dynamics is not specified, the martingale probability measure is unknown. Given a consensus on the actual distribution of the underlying price at maturity, we derive an upper bound on the call option price by putting two kinds of restrictions on the pricing probability measure. First, we put a restriction on the second risk-neutral moment of the underlying asset terminal value. Second, from equilibrium pricing arguments one can put a monotonicity restriction on the Radon-Nikodym density of the pricing probability with respect to the true probability measure. This density is restricted to be a nonincreasing function of the underlying price at maturity. The bound appears then as the solution of a constrained optimization problem and we adopt a duality approach to solve it. Explicit bounds are provided for the call option. Finally, we provide a numerical example.     

Equilibruim approach of asset pricing under Lévy process

This work considers the equilibrium approach of asset pricing for Lévy process. It derives the equity premium and pricing kernel analytically for the stock price process, obtains an equilibrium option pricing formula, and explains some empirical evidence such as the negative variance risk premium, implied volatility smirk, and negative skewness risk premium by comparing the physical and risk-neutral distributions of the log return. Different from most of the current studies in equilibrium pricing under jump diffusion models, this work models the underlying asset price as the exponential of a Lévy process and thus allows nearly an arbitrage distribution of the jump component.     

THE REGULARITY OF THE FREE BOUNDARY FOR STRIKE RESET OPTION

A strike reset option is an option that allows its holder to reset the strike price to the prevailing underlying asset price at a moment chosen by the holder. The pricing model of the option can be formulated as a parabolic variational inequality and the optimal reset strategy is the free boundary. The smoothness of the free boundary in some cases was showed in our article published in JDE. We would prove its smoothness in the other case in this paper by a generalized comparison principle for the variational inequality.     

Option Pricing in Illiquid Markets with Jumps

ABSTRACT

The classical linear Black–Scholes model for pricing derivative securities is a popular model in the financial industry. It relies on several restrictive assumptions such as completeness, and frictionless of the market as well as the assumption on the underlying asset price dynamics following a geometric Brownian motion. The main purpose of this paper is to generalize the classical Black–Scholes model for pricing derivative securities by taking into account feedback effects due to an influence of a large trader on the underlying asset price dynamics exhibiting random jumps. The assumption that an investor can trade large amounts of assets without affecting the underlying asset price itself is usually not satisfied, especially in illiquid markets. We generalize the Frey–Stremme nonlinear option pricing model for the case the underlying asset follows a Lévy stochastic process with jumps. We derive and analyze a fully nonlinear parabolic partial-integro differential equation for the price of the option contract. We propose a semi-implicit numerical discretization scheme and perform various numerical experiments showing the influence of a large trader and intensity of jumps on the option price.     

The regularity of the free boundary for strike reset option

A strike reset option is an option that allows its holder to reset the strike price to the prevailing underlying asset price at a moment chosen by the holder. The pricing model of the option can be formulated as a parabolic variational inequality and the optimal reset strategy is the free boundary. The smoothness of the free boundary in some cases was showed in our article published in JDE. We would prove its smoothness in the other case in this paper by a generalized comparison principle for the variational inequality.     

Approximate valuation of average options

This paper concerns the valuation of average options of European type where an investor has the right to buy the average of an asset price process over some time interval, as the terminal price, at a prespecified exercise price. A discrete model is first constructed and a recurrence formula is derived for the exact price of the discrete average call option. For the continuous average call option price, we derive some approximations and theoretical upper and lower bounds. These approximations are shown to be very accurate for at-the-money and in-the-money cases compared to the simulation results. The theoretical bounds can be used to provide useful information in pricing average options.     

MARKET FORCES AND DYNAMIC ASSET PRICING

We study a dynamic model of asset pricing which is driven by two characteristic market features: the law of investor demand (e.g., “buy low, sell high”) and the law of the market institution (which codifies the trading rules under which the market operates). We demonstrate in a simple investor–specialist trading market that these features are sufficient to guarantee an equilibrium where investors' trading strategies and the specialist's rule of price adjustments are best responses to each other. The drift term appearing in the resulting equation of the asset price process may be interpreted using Newtonian mechanics as the acceleration of a “market force.” If either of the market participants is risk-neutral, the result leads to risk-neutral asset pricing (e.g., the Black and Scholes option pricing formula).     

SDP Relaxation of Arbitrage Pricing Bounds Based on?Option Prices and Moments

This paper develops a semidefinite programming approach to computing bounds on the range of allowable absence of arbitrage prices for a European call option when option prices at other strikes and expirations are available and when moment related information on the underlying is known. The moment related information is incorporated in the problem through the fictitious prices of polynomial valued securities. The optimization then comes from relaxing a risk neutral pricing optimization problem in terms of moments of measures from a decomposition of the risk neutral pricing measure. We demonstrate this optimization formulation with computations using moment data from the standard Black-Scholes option pricing model and Merton’s jump diffusion model.     

Option pricing when the regime-switching risk is priced

We study the pricing of an option when the price dynamic of the underlying risky asset is governed by a Markov-modulated geometric Brownian motion. We suppose that the drift and volatility of the underlying risky asset are modulated by an observable continuous-time, finite-state Markov chain. We develop a two- stage pricing model which can price both the diffusion risk and the regime-switching risk based on the Esscher transform and the minimization of the maximum entropy between an equivalent martingale measure and the real-world probability measure over different states. Numerical experiments are conducted and their results reveal that the impact of pricing regime-switching risk on the option prices is significant.     

Pricing perpetual American options under multiscale stochastic elasticity of variance

This paper studies pricing the perpetual American options under a constant elasticity of variance type of underlying asset price model where the constant elasticity is replaced by a fast mean-reverting Ornstein–Ulenbeck process and a slowly varying diffusion process. By using a multiscale asymptotic analysis, we find the impact of the stochastic elasticity of variance on the option prices and the optimal exercise prices with respect to model parameters. Our results enhance the existing option price structures in view of flexibility and applicability through the market prices of elasticity risk.     

Trading volume in models of financial derivatives

This paper develops a subordinated stochastic process model for an asset price, where the directing process is identified as information. Motivated by recent empirical and theoretical work, the paper makes use of the under-used market statistic of transaction count as a suitable proxy for the information flow. An option pricing formula is derived, and comparisons with stochastic volatility models are drawn. Both the asset price and the number of trades are used in parameter estimation. The underlying process is found to be fast mean reverting, and this is exploited to perform an asymptotic expansion. The implied volatility skew is then used to calibrate the model.     

Approximate basket options valuation for a jump-diffusion model

In this paper we discuss the approximate basket options valuation for a jump-diffusion model. The underlying asset prices follow some correlated diffusion processes with idiosyncratic and systematic jumps. We suggest a new approximate pricing formula which is the weighted sum of Roger and Shi’s lower bound and the conditional second moment adjustments. We show that the approximate value is always within the lower and upper bounds of the option and is very sharp in our numerical tests.     

Computing arbitrage upper bounds on basket options in the presence of bid–ask spreads

We study the problem of computing the sharpest static-arbitrage upper bound on the price of a European basket option, given the bid–ask prices of vanilla call options in the underlying securities. We show that this semi-infinite problem can be recast as a linear program whose size is linear in the input data size. These developments advance previous related results, and enhance the practical value of static-arbitrage bounds as a pricing technique by taking into account the presence of bid–ask spreads. We illustrate our results by computing upper bounds on the price of a DJX basket option. The MATLAB code used to compute these bounds is available online at www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/jfp/arbitragebounds.html.     

Pricing Asian options of discretely monitored geometric average in the regime‐switching model

This paper provides analytic pricing formulas of discretely monitored geometric Asian options under the regime‐switching model. We derive the joint Laplace transform of the discount factor, the log return of the underlying asset price at maturity, and the logarithm of the geometric mean of the asset price. Then using the change of measures and the inversion of the transform, the prices and deltas of a fixed‐strike and a floating‐strike geometric Asian option are obtained. As the numerical results, we calculate the price of a fixed‐strike and a floating‐strike discrete geometric Asian call option using our formulas and compare with the results of the Monte Carlo simulation. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

双跳-扩散过程下的脆弱期权定价

本文考虑含有交易对手违约风险的衍生产品的定价,以公司价值信用风险模型为基础,在标的资产价格和公司价值均服从跳-扩散过程的情况下,运用结构化的方法对脆弱期权定价进行建模,建立了双跳-扩散过程下的脆弱期权定价模型,分别在公司负债固定和随机的情况下推导出了脆弱期权的定价公式.     

Asymptotic approach to the pricing of geometric asian options under the CEV model

This paper studies the pricing of Asian options whose payoffs depend on the average value of an underlying asset during the period to a maturity. Since the Asian option is not so sensitive to the value of underlying asset, the possibility of manipulation is relatively small than the other options such as European vanilla and barrier options. We derive the pricing formula of geometric Asian options under the constant elasticity of variance (CEV) model that is one of local volatility models, and investigate the implication of the CEV model for geometric Asian options.     

基于分数布朗运动的具有信息影响的投资组合期权定价

假设标的资产价格服从分数布朗散运动,其价格跳跃度服从复合Poisson分布,采用拟鞅定价的方法,得到了具有信息影响的投资组合的期权定价公式.     

Variance swaps under the threshold Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model

Variance swap is a typical financial tool for managing volatility risk. In this paper, we evaluate different types of variance swaps under a threshold Ornstein–Uhlenbeck model, which exhibits both mean reversion and regime switching features in the underlying asset price. We derive the analytical solution for the joint moment generating function of log‐asset prices at two distinct time points. This enables us to price various types of variance swaps analytically. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On European option pricing under partial information

We consider a European option pricing problem under a partial information market, i.e., only the security’s price can be observed, the rate of return and the noise source in the market cannot be observed. To make the problem tractable, we focus on gap option which is a generalized form of the classical European option. By using the stochastic analysis and filtering technique, we derive a Black-Scholes formula for gap option pricing with dividends under partial information. Finally, we apply filtering technique to solve a utility maximization problem under partial information through transforming the problem under partial information into the classical problem.