Governments and corporations frequently auction assets with embedded real options using both cash and contingent bids. I characterize equilibrium bidding and option exercise strategies, and find that the moral hazard associated with uncontractible investment timing inefficiently and...

Compound options are options for which the underlying is another option. In other words, a compound option is an option written on an option. In this paper, we present two new approaches to compound option pricing. The first approach relies on Malliavin calculus methods and the Clark-Ocone...

This paper investigates whether the overpricing of out-of-the money single stock calls can be explained by Tversky and Kahneman's (1992) cumulative prospect theory (CPT). We hypothesize that these options are expensive because investors overweight small probability events and overpay for...

This study incorporates the overextrapolation belief into the classic real options model. Using the stochastic dynamic programming method, we obtain the semiclosed-form solutions for the optimal investment and valuation of real options and the welfare loss owing to overextrapolation. The...

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...

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...

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...

Known discrete dollar dividends lead to non-recombining binomial trees (NR-BT) with an explosion of nodes, which are more difficult to implement and much less efficient. This paper proposes a method for constructing a recombining binomial tree via balanced dividend adjustments (BDA). BDA splits...

At each maturity a discrete return distribution is inferred from option prices. Option pricing models imply a comparable theoretical distribution. As both the transformed data and the option pricing model deliver points on a simplex, the data is statistically modeled by a Dirichlet distribution...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...