SHANNON’S INFORMATION THEORY ITS APPLICATIONS IN DERIVATIVE PRICING
ALEXANDER KUSHPEL AND JEREMY LEVESLEY
- Abstract. During the past two decades Lévy processes became very popular
in Financial Mathematics. Truncated Lévy distributions were used for mod- eling by Mantegna and Stanley [26], [27]. Later Novikov [29] and Koponen [16] introduced a family of in…nitely divisible analogs of these distributions. These models have been generalised by Boyarchenko and Levendorskii [6], and are known now as KoBoL models. Such models provide a good …t in many
- situations. Our aim is to shed a fresh light onto the pricing theory using regu-
lar Lévy processes of exponential type. We analyse pricing formula, construct and discuss several methods of approximation which are almost optimal in the sense of respective n-widths. Our approach has its roots in Shannon’s Information Theory.
- 1. introduction
To motivate the reader we start with the one dimensional situation. We shall study a common frictionless market consisting of a riskless bond and stock which is modeled by an exponential Lévy process St = eXt under a …xed equivalent martingale measure Q with a given constant riskless rate r > 0. Since in our model the stock does not pay dividends then the discounted stock price ertSt must be a martingale under Q. Consider a contract (European call option) which gives to its owner the right but not the obligation to buy the underlying asset for the …xed strike price K at the speci…ed expiry date T. We need to evaluate its price Fcall(St; t). In this case the payo¤ has the form (1.1) G(x) = (ex K)+; where for any a 2 R, (a)+ = maxfa; 0g, K is the strike price and x = ln St. In the classical Merton-Black-Scholes model the price of a stock follows the Geo- metric Brownian motion de…ned as St = exp(Xt), where Xt, t 0 is the Brownian motion with the probability density function pt(x) =
- 22t
1=2 exp
- (x t)2
22t
- for the increments Xt+t Xt and parameters and are known as drift and
volatility respectively. It is well-known that Merton-Black-Scholes theory becomes much more e¢cient if additional stochastic factors are introduced. Consequently, it is important to consider a wider family of Lévy processes. Stable Lévy processes have been used …rst in this context by Mandelbrot [25] and Fama [13].
Date: June 26, 2011. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classi…cation. 91G20, 60G51, 91G60, 91G80. Key words and phrases. Lévy process, n-widths, Wiener spaces, approximation.
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