This paper proposes a new explanation for the smile and skewness effects in implied volatilities. Starting from a microeconomic equilibrium approach, we develop a diffusion model for stock prices explicitly incorporating the technical demand induced by hedging strategies. This leads to a...

The basic model of financial economics is the Samuelson model of geometric Brownian motion because of the celebrated Black-Scholes formula for pricing the call option. The asset volatility is a linear function of the asset value and the model guarantees positive asset prices. We show that the...

The Paper reports a basic Experiment on the option pricing approach. Each trader with an increasing utility for money values the option with his arbitrage free price, which is independent of the probability of the stock movement. The experimental data show that the traiders learn to exploit more...

In this paper we analyze in what way the demand generated by dynamic hedging strategies affects the equilibrium prices of the underlying asset. We derive an explicit expression for the transformation of market volatility under the impact of hedging. It turns out that market volatility increases...

Let X be a seminmartingale and Teta the space of all predictable X-integrable processes teta such that integral tetat dX is inthe space S square of semimartingales. We consider the problem of approximating a given random variable H element of L square (P) by the sum of a constant c and a...

We review the continuous--time literature on the so-- called direct approach to bond option pricing. Going back to Ball and Torous (1983), this approach models bond price processes directly (i.e. without reference to interest rates or state variable processes) and applies methods that Black and...

In this survey we discuss models with level-dependent and stochastic volatility from the viewpoint of erivative asset analysis. Both classes of models are generalisations of the classical Black-Scholes model; they have been developed in an effort to build models that are flexible enough to cope...

Starting with observable annually compounded forward rates we derive a term structure model of interest rates. The model relies upon the assumption that a specific set of annually compounded forward rates is log-normally distributed. We derive solutions for interest rate caps and floors as well...

In this paper a stochastic volatility model is presented that directly prescribes the stochastic development of the implied Black-Scholes volatilities of a set of given standard options. Thus the model is able to capture the stochastic movements of a full term structure of implied volatilities....

We study the problem of convergence of discrete-time option values to continuous-time option values. While previous papers typically concentrate on the approximation of geometric Brownian motion by a binomial tree, we consider here the case where the model is incomplete in both continuos and...