A penalty-based method from reconstructing smooth local volatility surface from American options

This paper is devoted to develop a robust penalty-based method of reconstructing smooth local volatility surface from the observed American option prices. This reconstruction problem is posed as an inverse problem: given a nite set of observed American option prices, nd a local volatility function...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, K., Teo, Kok Lay
Format: Journal Article
Published: American Institute of Mathematical Sciences 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/3463
Description
Summary:This paper is devoted to develop a robust penalty-based method of reconstructing smooth local volatility surface from the observed American option prices. This reconstruction problem is posed as an inverse problem: given a nite set of observed American option prices, nd a local volatility function such that the theoretical option prices matches the observed ones optimally with respect to a prescribed performance criterion. The theoretical American option prices are governed by a set of partial dierential complementarity problems (PDCP). We propose a penalty-based numerical method for the solution of the PDCP. Typically, the reconstruction problem is ill-posed and a bicubic spline regularization technique is thus proposed to overcome this diculty. We apply a gradient-based optimization algorithm to solve this nonlinear optimization problem, where the Jacobian of the cost function is computed via nite dierence approximation. Two numerical experiments: a synthetic American put option example and a real market American put option example, are performed to show the robustness and eectiveness of the proposed method to reconstructing the unknown volatility surface.