We develop a mathematical proof demonstrating that only financially-strong firms will sell put options on their own stock, but financially-weak firms will not. The sale of options on a company's own stock exposes the buyer to default risk of the issuer, which additionally complicates the payoff...

Contrary to the common view that exact pricing is prohibitive owing to the curse of dimensionality, this study proposes an efficient and unified method for pricing options under multivariate Black-Scholes-Merton (BSM) models, such as the basket, spread, and Asian options. The option price is...

We analyze the joint cross-section of monthly S&P500 stock index options and monthly CBOE Volatility Index options by constructing and evaluating option combinations that appear undervalued for all permissible values of the latent parameters of the unifying option pricing model and the joint...

This paper considers the introduction of stock options in an (dynamically) incomplete securities market made up of a riskless bond and the stock. The stock price follows a geometric Brownian motion with constant drift. However, there is incomplete information about the unknown stochastic...

We present a closed form solution to the perpetual American double barrier call option problem in a model driven by Brownian motion and a compound Poisson process with exponential jumps. The method of proof is based on reducing the inital irregular optimal stopping problem to an...

During the last decade, markets for covered warrants (bank-issued options) have flourished in Europe and Asia. In these markets, investors often face a choice between many instruments that differ only slightly from each other. Based on retail trades in call options on the German DAX index, this...

Security prices contain valuable information that can be used to make a wide variety of economic decisions. To extract this information, a model is required that relates market prices to the desired information, and that ideally can be implemented using timely and low-cost methods. The authors...

We model the dynamics of asset prices and associated derivatives by consideration of the dynamics of the conditional probability density process for the value of an asset at some specified time in the future. In the case where the asset is driven by Brownian motion, an associated "master...