SWING OPTION PRICING BY DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING WITH B-SPLINE DENSITY PROJECTION

Swing options are a type of exotic financial derivative which generalize American options to allow for multiple early-exercise actions during the contract period. These contracts are widely traded in commodity and energy markets, but are often difficult to value using standard techniques due to their complexity and strong path-dependency. There are numerous interesting varieties of swing options, which differ in terms of their intermediate cash flows, and the constraints (both local and global) which they impose on early-exercise (swing) decisions. We introduce an efficient and general purpose transform-based method for pricing discrete and continuously monitored swing options under exponential Lévy models, which applies to contracts with fixed rights clauses, as well as recovery time delays between exercise. The approach combines dynamic programming with an efficient method for calculating the continuation value between monitoring dates, and applies generally to multiple early-exercise contracts, providing a unified framework for pricing a large class of exotic derivatives. Efficiency and accuracy of the method are supported by a series of numerical experiments which further provide benchmark prices for future research.

Numerical methods for an optimal multiple stopping problem

This paper deals with numerical solutions to an optimal multiple stopping problem. The corresponding dynamic programing (DP) equation is a variational inequality satisfied by the value function in the viscosity sense. The convergence of the numerical scheme is shown by viscosity arguments. An optimal quantization method is used for computing the conditional expectations arising in the DP equation. Numerical results are presented for the price of swing option and the behavior of the value function.