JDOI Variance Reduction Method and the Pricing of American-Style Options

Abstract

The present article revisits the Diffusion Operator Integral (DOI) variance reduction technique originally proposed in [HP02] and extends its theoretical concept to the pricing of American-style options under (time-homogeneous) Levy stochastic differential equations. The resulting Jump Diffusion Operator Integral (JDOI) method can be combined with numerous Monte Carlo based stopping-time algorithms, including the ubiquitous least-squares Monte Carlo (LSMC) algorithm of Longstaff and Schwartz (cf. [Car96], [LS01]). We exemplify the usefulness of our theoretical derivations under a concrete, though very general jump-diffusion stochastic volatility dynamics and test the resulting LSMC based version of the JDOI method. The results provide evidence of a strong variance reduction when compared with a simple application of the LSMC algorithm and proves that applying our technique on top of Monte Carlo based pricing schemes provides a powerful way to speed-up these methods.