Standard Monte Carlo methods can often be significantly improved with the addition of appropriate variance reduction techniques. In this paper a new and powerful variance reduction technique is presented. The method is based directly on the Ito calculus and is used to find unbiased variance...

In this paper we consider the pricing of an American call option whose underlying asset dynamics evolve under the influence of two independent stochastic volatility processes of the Heston (1993) type. We derive the associated partial differential equation (PDE) of the option price using hedging...

This paper considers the problem of pricing American options when the dynamics of the underlying are driven by both stochastic volatility following a square root process as used by Heston (1993), and by a Poisson jump process as introduced by Merton (1976). Probability arguments are invoked to...

This paper presents a generalisation of McKean's free boundary value problem for American options by considering an American strangle position, where the early exercise of one side of the payoff will knock-out the out-of-the-money side. When attempting to evaluate the price of this American...

Margrabe provides a pricing formula for an exchange option where the distributions of both stock prices are log-normal with correlated Wiener components. Merton has provided a formula for the price of a European call option on a single stock where the stock price process contains a continuous...

This paper surveys some of the literature on American option pricing, in particular the representations of McKean (1965), Kim (1990) and Carr, Jarrow and Myneni (1992). It is proposed that the approach regarding the problem as a free boundary value problem, and solving this via incomplete...

This paper considers the Fourier transform approach to derive the implicit integral equation for the price of an American call option in the case where the underlying asset follows a jump-diffusion process. Using the method of Jamshidian (1992), we demonstrate that the call option price is given...

In this paper we derive the implicit integral equation for the price of an American call option in the case where the underlying asset follows a jump-diffusion process. We extend McKean's incomplete Fourier transform approach to solve the free boundary problem under Merton's framework, with the...

This paper presents a numerical method for pricing American call options where the underlying asset price follows a jump-diffusion process. The method is based on the Fourier-Hermite series expansions of Chiarella, El-Hassan & Kucera (1999), which we extend to allow for Poisson jumps, in the...