The paper is focused on numerical approximation of early exercise boundary within American put option pricing problem. Assuming non-dividend paying, American put option leads to two disjunctive regions, a continuation one and a stopping one, which are separated by an early exercise boundary. We present variational formulation of American option problem with special attention to early exercise a...

This paper will derive the Black-Scholes pricing model of a European option by calculating the expected value of the option. We will assume that the stock price is log-normally distributed and that the universe is riskneutral. Then, using Ito’s Lemma, we will justify the use of the risk-neutral rate in these initial calculations. Finally, we will prove put-call parity in order to price European...

It is common for firms to issue or purchase options on the firm’s own stock. Examples include convertible bonds, warrants, call options as employee compensation, and the sale of put options as part of share repurchase programs. This paper shows that option positions with implicit borrowing—such as put sales and call purchases—are tax-disadvantaged relative to the equivalent synthetic option wit...

Optimal stopping is a sub-field of probability theory that is present within mathematical finance, mathematical statistics, stochastic calculus and other disciplines. In mathematical finance, one well known problem is the pricing of an American put option. In this thesis we first give a brief review of some general optimal stopping theory, its connection to free-boundary problems and we then ex...

We prove that the perpetual American put option price of an exponential Lévy process whose jumps come from a compound Poisson process is the classical solution of its associated quasi-variational inequality, that it is C except at the stopping boundary and that it is C everywhere (i.e. the smooth pasting condition always holds). We prove this fact by constructing a sequence of functions, each o...