怎么介绍?
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2017-12-05 16:27:52
It is complex to price American options since they can be exercised at any time point up to expiry date. The time the holder chooses to exercise the options depends on the spot price of the underlying asset . In this sense the exercising time is a random variable itself. It is obvious that the Black-Scholes differential equations still hold as long as the options are not exercised. However the boundary conditions are so complicated that an analytical solution is not possible. In this section we study American options in more detail. The numerical procedures of pricing will also be discussed in the next section.
As shown in Section , the right to early exercise implies that the value of an American option can never drop below its intrinsic value. For example the value of an American put should not go below with the exercise price . In contrast this condition does not hold for European options. Thus American puts would be exercised before expiry date if the value of the option would drop below the intrinsic value.
Let's consider an American put on a stock with expiry date . If the stock price at time is zero, then holds for since the price process follows a geometric Brownian motion. It is then not worth waiting for a later exercise any more. If the put holder waits, he will loose the interests on the value that can be received from a bond investment for example. If , the value of the put at is which is the same as the intrinsic value. Since the respective European put cannot be exercised early, e.g. at time , we can only get on the expiry date. If we discount it to time with , we only get that is the value of the European put at time . Obviously this value is smaller than the value of an American put and its intrinsic value. Figure shows the put value with a continuous cost of carry .
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As we can see an early exercise of the put is maybe necessary even before . For a certain critical stock price , the lost of interests on the intrinsic value, which the holder can receive by exercising it immediately, is higher than the possible increase of the option value due to the eventual underlying fluctuations. That is one of the reasons why the critical underlying price is dependent on time: .
From the derivation of the Black-Scholes differential equations it follows that they are valid as long as the option is not exercised. Given that there are no transaction costs in perfect markets, a revenue can be realized from an early exercise, which equals to the intrinsic value of the option. One says in this case that the option falls back to its intrinsic value by early exercising. Thus the pricing of American options is an open boundary problem. The Black-Scholes differential equations are valid where the underlying is either higher than the critical put-price or lower than the critical call-price . The boundaries defined through and are unknown.
Figure shows the regions where the option price for an American call satisfies the Black-Scholes differential equations.
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The numerical solution for such boundary problems is described in the next section. Based on the assumptions of perfect markets and arbitrage free argument in Section we derive some properties of American options without considering any specific mathematical models for the price process .
Proof:
Let denote the exercise price, the expiry date, the time to maturity of a call and the price of the underlying asset. and denote the value of the respective American and European calls at time with time to maturity and the spot price . Using the put-call parity for European options we find
(9.1) |
(9.2) |
(9.3) |
Figure shows a graphical representation of the first part of the theorem.
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It is also possible to derive a formula similar to the put call parity for American options. Given that the model is unknown for the critical price , and consequently the time point for early exercise, the formula is just an inequality.
(9.4) |
if (9.5) | |||
if |
Proof:
Supposing without any restriction that the underlying asset is a stock paying dividends at time .
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1. We show first the left inequality. We consider a portfolio consisting of the following four positions:
Therefore it holds for every time as mentioned:
(9.6) |
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(9.7) |
2. For continuous cost of carry we first consider the case where . We prove the left inequality at first
(9.8) |
If, on the other hand, the call is exercised early at time , the whole portfolio is then liquidated and we get:
(9.9) |
(9.10) |
(9.11) |
We show now the right inequality for the case
(9.12) |
(9.13) |
(9.14) |
(9.15) |
(9.16) |