Is Reinforcement Learning Good at American Option Valuation?

Abstract

This paper investigates algorithms for identifying the optimal policy for pricing American Options. The American Option pricing is reformulated as a Sequential Decision-Making problem with two binary actions (Exercise or Continue), transforming it into an optimal stopping time problem. Both the least square Monte Carlo simulation method (LSM) and Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based methods were utilized to find the optimal policy and, hence, the fair value of the American Put Option. Both Classical Geometric Brownian Motion (GBM) and calibrated Stochastic Volatility models served as the underlying uncertain assets. The novelty of this work lies in two aspects: (1) Applying LSM- and RL-based methods to determine option prices, with a specific focus on analyzing the dynamics of “Decisions” made by each method and comparing final decisions chosen by the LSM and RL methods. (2) Assess how the RL method updates “Decisions” at each batch, revealing the evolution of the decisions during the learning process to achieve optimal policy.