EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Robust option pricing: Hannan and Blackwell meet Black and Scholes

Peter DeMarzo, Ilan Kremer and Yishay Mansour

Journal of Economic Theory, 2016, vol. 163, issue C, 410-434

Abstract: We apply methods developed in the literature initiated by Hannan and Blackwell on robust optimization, approachability and calibration, to price financial securities. Rather than focus on asymptotic performance, we show how gradient strategies developed to minimize asymptotic regret imply financial trading strategies that yield arbitrage-based bounds for option prices. These bounds are new and robust in that they do not depend on the continuity of the stock price process, complete markets, or an assumed pricing kernel. They depend only on the realized quadratic variation of the price process, which can be measured and, importantly, hedged in financial markets using existing securities. Our results also apply directly to a new class of options called timer options. Finally, we argue that the Hannan–Blackwell strategy is path dependent and therefore suboptimal with a finite horizon. We improve it by solving for the optimal path-independent strategy, and compare the resulting bounds with Black–Scholes.

Keywords: Approachability; Calibration; Regret minimization; Robust optimization; Option pricing; Arbitrage bounds (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D81 G13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053116000107
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:163:y:2016:i:c:p:410-434

DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2016.01.009

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Theory is currently edited by A. Lizzeri and K. Shell

More articles in Journal of Economic Theory from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:jetheo:v:163:y:2016:i:c:p:410-434