This paper examines how an option plan that rewards managers for firm performance relative to some market or industry benchmark should be structured, and gauges the deadweight costs of such a plan. Relative-performance-based compensation advocates contend that conventional stock options do not adequately discriminate between strong and weak managers, typically suggesting “indexed options,” that...

The paper deals with the problem of optimal behavior of an investor in the option market with own opinion on market properties. We tell the difference between investor's and market probability distribution functions of future prices of underlier. In this case, the investor might gain in the average income. If the investor, however, is guided by the presently popular Value-at-Risk criterion in t...

Alternative strategies for predicting stock market volatility are examined. In out-of-sample forecasting experiments implied-volatility information, derived from contemporaneously observed option prices or history-based volatility predictors, such as GARCH models, are investigated, to determine if they are more appropriate for predicting future return volatility. Employing German DAX-index retu...

We analyze a dynamic market in which buyers compete in a sequence of auctions for common value or differentiated goods. New buyers and objects may arrive at random times. Since objects are imperfect substitutes, buyers’ private values are not persistent. Instead, buyers receive new signals or draw new values in each period. We consider the use of second-price auctions for selling these objects....

This paper examines how an option plan that rewards managers for firm performance relative to some market or industry benchmark should be structured, and gauges the deadweight costs of such a plan. Relative-performance-based compensation advocates contend that conventional stock options do not adequately discriminate between strong and weak managers, typically suggesting “indexed options,” that...

In this thesis I present a framework for intelligent software agents to manage risk in electronic marketplaces using Option Derivatives. To compare the performance of agents that trade Option Derivatives with agents not using them, I create a simulation of a financial marketplace in which software agents are vested with decision rules for buying and selling assets and Options. The motivation of...

We see that the price of an european call option in a stochastic volatility framework can be decomposed in the sum of four terms, which identify the main features of the market that affect to option prices: the expected future volatility, the correlation between the volatility and the noise driving the stock prices, the market price of volatility risk and the difference of the expected future v...

We consider hedging of a path-dependent European style option with convex continuous payoff in a discrete time incomplete market, where underlying stock price jumps are distributed over a bounded interval. The incompleteness of the market produces an interval of no-arbitrage option prices for the path-dependent option. Upper and lower bounds for the noarbitrage price interval are developed. Exp...