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Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis Vol. 39 No. 2 2004

Monte Carlo Valuation of American Options through Computation of the Optimal Exercise Frontier

Alfredo Ibáñez1; Fernando Zapatero2

1 Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México · 2 University of Southern California

Abstract

This paper introduces a Monte Carlo simulation method for pricing multidimensional American options based on the computation of the optimal exercise frontier. We consider Bermudan options that can be exercised at a finite number of times and compute the optimal exercise frontier recursively. We show that for every date of possible exercise, any single point of the optimal exercise frontier is a fixed point of a simple algorithm. Once the frontier is computed, we use plain vanilla Monte Carlo simulation to price the option and obtain a low-biased estimator. We illustrate the method with applications to several types of options.

DOI
10.1017/s0022109000003069
Volume
39
Issue
2
Pages
253-275
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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