We show that if the discounted Stock price process is a continuous martingale, then there is a simple relationship linking the variance of the terminal Stock price and the variance of its arithmetic average. We use this to establish a model-independent upper bound for the price of a continuously...

R&D is often a highly uncertain venture where experiments achieve successful outcomes on an extraordinarily rare basis. Just one successful product could change the future of a company; the discovery stage can often be an invaluable or disastrous experience. We develop a real R&D option model...

Basket options are among the most popular products of the new generation of exotic options. This attraction is explained by the fact that they can efficiently and simultaneously hedge a wide variety of intrinsically different financial risks. They are flexible enough to include all the risks...

We apply the Malliavin calculus to the stochastic string framework and obtain a Clark-Ocone-like formula. This result allows us to rewrite the hedging portfolio explicitly in terms of the Malliavin derivative of the discounted payoff. We illustrate this new result with two applications. Firstly,...

The “practitioner Black-Scholes delta” for hedging options is a delta calculated from the Black-Scholes-Merton model (or one of its extensions) with the volatility parameter set equal to the implied volatility. As has been pointed out by a number of researchers, this delta does not minimize...

The pricing of vanilla options on underliers with cash dividends is a surprisingly contentious and active research subject, for both European or American exercise style. Neither on the listed options side (calls and puts) nor on the flow/structured side of longer-term vanillas or light exotics...

Option pricing literature is usually concerned with financial contracts whose payoffs depend on decisions by only one of the contract's parties. Generalizations to more complex cases with decisions by both parties are impeded by the ad-hoc nature of many contributions. One prominent example...

Both barrier options and the Heston stochastic volatility model are omnipresent in real-life applications of financial mathematics. Therefore, we apply the Heath-Platen (HP) estimator as first introduced by Heath and Platen to price barrier options in the Heston model setting as an alternative...

This is the first paper to calculate and analyze option-implied dividends for individual US companies, while accounting for the early exercise premium. These firm-level implied dividends show substantial variation relative to actual dividends over time as well as in the cross-section. Implied...