Paper 3, Section II, J

Stochastic Financial Models
Part II, 2017

(a) State the fundamental theorem of asset pricing for a multi-period model.

Consider a market model in which there is no arbitrage, the prices for all European put and call options are already known and there is a riskless asset S0=(St0)t{0,,T}S^{0}=\left(S_{t}^{0}\right)_{t \in\{0, \ldots, T\}} with St0=(1+r)tS_{t}^{0}=(1+r)^{t} for some r0r \geqslant 0. The holder of a so-called 'chooser option' C(K,t0,T)C\left(K, t_{0}, T\right) has the right to choose at a preassigned time t0{0,1,,T}t_{0} \in\{0,1, \ldots, T\} between a European call and a European put option on the same asset S1S^{1}, both with the same strike price KK and the same maturity TT. [We assume that at time t0t_{0} the holder will take the option having the higher price at that time.]

(b) Show that the payoff function of the chooser option is given by

C(K,t0,T)={(ST1K)+if St01>K(1+r)t0T(KST1)+otherwise C\left(K, t_{0}, T\right)= \begin{cases}\left(S_{T}^{1}-K\right)^{+} & \text {if } S_{t_{0}}^{1}>K(1+r)^{t_{0}-T} \\ \left(K-S_{T}^{1}\right)^{+} & \text {otherwise }\end{cases}

(c) Show that the price π(C(K,t0,T))\pi\left(C\left(K, t_{0}, T\right)\right) of the chooser option C(K,t0,T)C\left(K, t_{0}, T\right) is given by

π(C(K,t0,T))=π(EC(K,T))+π(EP(K(1+r)t0T,t0)),\pi\left(C\left(K, t_{0}, T\right)\right)=\pi(E C(K, T))+\pi\left(E P\left(K(1+r)^{t_{0}-T}, t_{0}\right)\right),

where π(EC(K,T))\pi(E C(K, T)) and π(EP(K,T))\pi(E P(K, T)) denote the price of a European call and put option, respectively, with strike KK and maturity TT.