No-arbitrage bounds on American Put Options with a single maturity

We consider in this thesis the problem of pricing American Put Options in a model-free framework where we do not make any assumptions about the price dynamics of the underlying except those implied by the no-arbitrage conditions. Our goal is to obtain bounds on the price of an American put option with a given strike and maturity directly from the prices of other American put options with the same maturity but different strikes and the current price of the underlying. We proceed by first investigating the structural properties of the price curve of American Put Options of a fixed maturity and derive necessary and sufficient conditions that strike - price pairs of these options must satisfy in order to exclude arbitrage. Using these conditions, we can find tight bounds on the price of the option of interest by solving a very tractable Linear Programming Problem. We then apply the methods developed to real market data. We observe that the quality of bounds that we obtain compares well with the quoted bid-ask spreads in most cases.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Shah, Premal (Premal Y.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Dimitris J. Bertsimas.

• Operations Research Center.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/36232

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/36232