This paper studies modelling and existence issues for market models of option prices in a continuous-time framework with one stock, one bond and a family of European call options for one fixed maturity and all strikes. After arguing that (classical) implied volatilities are ill-suited for...

We propose an approach to the valuation of payoffs in general semimartingale models of financial markets where prices are nonnegative. Each asset price can hit 0; we only exclude that this ever happens simultaneously for all assets. We start from two simple, economically motivated axioms, namely...

In general multi-asset models of financial markets, the classic no-arbitrage concepts NFLVR and NUPBR have the serious shortcoming that they depend crucially on the way prices are discounted. To avoid this economically unnatural behaviour, we introduce a new way of defining “absence of...

The Paper reports a basic Experiment on the option pricing approach. Each trader with an increasing utility for money values the option with his arbitrage free price, which is independent of the probability of the stock movement. The experimental data show that the traiders learn to exploit more...

We review the continuous--time literature on the so-- called direct approach to bond option pricing. Going back to Ball and Torous (1983), this approach models bond price processes directly (i.e. without reference to interest rates or state variable processes) and applies methods that Black and...

Starting with observable annually compounded forward rates we derive a term structure model of interest rates. The model relies upon the assumption that a specific set of annually compounded forward rates is log-normally distributed. We derive solutions for interest rate caps and floors as well...

We deal with the valuration and hedging of non path-dependent European options on one or several underlyings in a model of an international economy which allows for both interest rate and exchange rate risk. Using martingale theory we provide a unified and easily applicable approach to pricing...