A Bimodal Model for Oil Prices

Abstract

Oil price behaviour over the last 10 years has shown to be bimodal in character, displaying a strong tendency to congregate around one range of high oil prices and one range of low prices, indicating two distinct peaks in its frequency distribution. In this paper, we propose a new, single nonlinear stochastic process to model the bimodal behaviour, namely, dp=α(p1−p)(p2−p(p3−p)dt+σpγdZ, γ=0,0.5. Further, we find analytic approximations of oil price futures under this model in the cases where the stable fixed points of the corresponding deterministic model are (a) evenly spaced about the unstable fixed point and (b) are spaced in the ratio 1:2 about the unstable fixed point. The solutions are shown to produce accurate prices when compared to numerical solutions.