Penalty Approach to the HJB Equation Arising in European Stock Option Pricing with Proportional Transaction Costs

We present a novel penalty approach to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation arising from the valuation of European options with proportional transaction costs. We first approximate the HJB equation by a quasilinear 2nd-order partial differential equation containing two linear penalty terms with penalty parameters λ ₁ and λ ₂ respectively. Then, we show that there exists a unique viscosity solution to the penalized equation. Finally, we prove that, when both λ ₁ and λ ₂ approach infinity, the viscosity solution to the penalized equation converges to that of the corresponding original HJB equation.