Pricing American Interest Rate Options in a Heath-Jarrow-Morton Framework Using Method of Lines

We consider the pricing of American bond options in a Heath-Jarrow-Morton framework in which the forward rate volatility is a function of time to maturity and the instantaneous spot rate of interest. We have shown in Chiarella and El-Hassan (1996) that the resulting pricing partial differential operators are two dimensional in the spatial variables. In this paper we investigate an efficientnumerical method to solve there partial differential equations for American option prices and the corresponding free exercise surface. We consider in particular the method of lines which other investigators (eg Carr and Faguet (1994) and Van der Hoek and Meyer (1997)) have found to be efficient for American option pricing when there is one spatial variable. In extending this method for the two dimensional case, we solve the pricing equation by discretising the time variable and one state varialbe and using the spot rate of interest as a continuous variable. We compare our method with the lattice method of Li, Ritchken and Sankarasubramanian (1995).