Calibration Design of Implied Volatility Surfaces

The calibration of option pricing models leads to the minimization of an error functional. We show that its usual specification as a root mean squared error implies fluctuating exotics prices and possibly wrong prices. We propose a simple and natural method to overcome these problems, illustrate drawbacks of the usual approach and show advantages of our method. To this end, we calibrate the Heston model to a time series of DAX implied volatility surfaces and then price cliquet options.