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Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 107 No. 3 2013

Probability weighting functions implied in options prices

Valery Polkovnichenko1,2; Feng Zhao3

1 Federal Reserve · 2 Federal Reserve Board of Governors · 3 The University of Texas at Dallas

Abstract

The empirical pricing kernels estimated from index options are non-monotone (Rosenberg and Engle, 2002, Bakshi et al., 2010) and the corresponding risk-aversion functions can be negative (Aït-Sahalia and Lo, 2000, Jackwerth, 2000). We show theoretically that these and several other properties of empirical pricing kernels are consistent with rank-dependent utility model with probability weighting function, which overweights tail events. We also estimate the pricing kernels nonparametrically from the Standard & Poor's 500 index options and construct empirical probability weighting functions. The estimated probability weights typically have the inverse-S shape, which overweights tail events and is widely supported by the experimental decision theory.

DOI
10.1016/j.jfineco.2012.09.008
Volume
107
Issue
3
Pages
580-609
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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