AN IMPROVED MARKOV CHAIN APPROXIMATION METHODOLOGY: DERIVATIVES PRICING AND MODEL CALIBRATION

This paper presents an improved continuous-time Markov chain approximation (MCA) methodology for pricing derivatives and for calibrating model parameters. We propose a generalized nonequidistant grid model for a general stochastic differential equation, and extend the proposed model to accommodate a jump component. Because the prices of derivatives generated by the MCA models are sensitive to the setting of the chain's state space, we suggest a heuristic determination of the grid spacing such that the Kolmogorov–Smirnov distance between the underlying distribution and the MCA distribution is minimized. The continuous time setting allows us to introduce semi-analytical formulas for pricing European and American style options. The numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed model with a nonequidistant grid setting provides superior results over the equidistant grid setting. Finally, we present the MCA maximum likelihood estimator for a jump-diffusion process. The encouraging results from the simulation and empirical studies provide insight into calibration problems in finance where the density function of a jump-diffusion model is unknown.