Option Pricing and Hedging in the Presence of Transaction Costs and Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations

Abstract

In the presence of transaction costs the perfect option replication is impossible which invalidates the celebrated Black and Scholes (1973) model. In this chapter we consider some approaches to option pricing and hedging in the presence of transaction costs. The distinguishing feature of all these approaches is that the solution for the option price and hedging strategy is given by a nonlinear partial differential equation (PDE). We start with a review of the Leland (1985) approach which yields a nonlinear parabolic PDE for the option price, one of the first such in finance. Since the Leland's approach to option pricing has been criticized on different grounds, we present a justification of this approach and show how the performance of the Leland's hedging strategy can be improved. We extend the Leland's approach to cover the pricing and hedging of options on commodity futures contracts, as well as path-dependent and basket options. We also present examples of finite-difference schemes to solve some nonlinear PDEs. Then we proceed to the review of the most successful approach to option hedging with transaction costs, the utility-based approach pioneered by Hodges and Neuberger (1989). Judging against the best possible tradeoff between the risk and the costs of a hedging strategy, this approach seems to achieve excellent empirical performance. The asymptotic analysis of the option pricing and hedging in this approach reveals that the solution is also given by a nonlinear PDE. However, this approach has one major drawback that prevents the broad application of this approach in practice, namely, the lack of a closed-form solution. The numerical computations are cumbersome to implement and the calculations of the optimal hedging strategy are time consuming. Using the results of asymptotic analysis we suggest a simplified parameterized functional form of the optimal hedging strategy for either a single option or a portfolio of options and a method for finding the optimal parameters.