Analytic approach to solve a degenerate parabolic PDE for the Heston model

We present an analytic approach to solve a degenerate parabolic problem associated with the Heston model, which is widely used in mathematical finance to derive the price of an European option on an risky asset with stochastic volatility. We give a variational formulation, involving weighted Sobolev spaces, of the second‐order degenerate elliptic operator of the parabolic PDE. We use this approach to prove, under appropriate assumptions on some involved unknown parameters, the existence and uniqueness of weak solutions to the parabolic problem on unbounded subdomains of the half‐plane. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.