1. Introduction
More than thirty years ago, it was observed that the commonly used Black–Scholes model does not fully describe the financial reality. One of the phenomena confirming this, known as the implied volatility smile, is the dependence of option-implied volatility on option strike (see, e.g., [
1]). Taking this phenomenon into account, Dupire [
2] and Derman and Kani [
3] introduced a deterministic function of the spot price of the underlying asset
and time to the Black–Scholes model for the description of the instantaneous volatility of
. The proposed form of instantaneous volatility initialised the class of local volatility models, preserving the advantages of the Black and Scholes approach.
The classical Dupire formula (or Dupire’s forward equation) for the no-arbitrage price
of the European call option with maturity
and strike price
at time zero takes the following form:
with
for a deterministic instantaneous risk-free interest rate
; a traded stock with price
of the following form with respect to the risk-neutral measure
:
a deterministic local volatility function
; and the standard Brownian motion
with respect to
(see, e.g., [
4]). The symbol
used above denotes the expected value with respect to
.
Equation (1) enables the recovery of the volatility function from market prices of options (see, e.g., [
5,
6]).
One of the first extensions of Equation (1) was made by Andersen and Andreasen [
7] for Markov jump-diffusions and by Carr et al. [
8] for local Lévy models. The Dupire formula for the European call option was significantly extended by Bentata and Cont [
9], who assumed a semimartingale model of the underlying asset and a deterministic bounded form of the instantaneous interest rate. Recent extensions of Dupire’s equation for the Margrabe options (see [
10] and also [
11] and references therein) were made by Gatarek and Jabłecki [
12] and Nowak and Gatarek [
13,
14]. Moreover, Hambly et al. [
15] considered the case of barrier options. In turn, Hainaut and Leonenko [
16] derived the fractional version of the Dupire formula for invertible Lévy subordinators.
Most extensions of Equation (1) concern the case of a deterministic or stochastic form of the instantaneous interest rate while assuming that the underlying asset price process is continuous (see, e.g., [
17,
18,
19] for the stochastic interest rate case). However, Benhamou et al. [
20] considered a hybrid model consisting of a stochastic form of the interest rate and a discontinuous process describing the asset price.
The method of option pricing with the application of the Dupire formula has been continuously developing since the 1990s. Initially, this formula was derived and applied to European vanilla options within the Black–Scholes model. Subsequently, it has been used for other types of options and models of the underlying asset price. In many cases, however, the formula was derived in a heuristic manner, disregarding the verification of mathematical assumptions. This fact may result in doubts about the correctness and applicability of the aforementioned formula to various specific cases. For financial practitioners, these doubts have led the need to apply the strictly mathematically justified Dupire formula. This article and previous papers [
13,
14] address this need and expectation. Mathematical problems related to the non-differentiability of the pay-off function have led to the necessity of involving distributions. The importance of the mathematical correctness of the Dupire formula applied in financial practice was also highlighted by Bentata and Cont [
9], who also used a distributional approach.
This paper aims to provide a mathematically rigorous proof of the Dupire formula for the European call option in the space of distributions. This proof is based on a generalised Dupire equation for the Margrabe option, proved in detail in [
14] for processes of asset prices in the form of Levý-type stochastic integrals, satisfying the appropriate mathematical assumptions. In our approach, we assume that the underlying financial instrument is described by the model proposed by Merton in 1976 (see, e.g., [
7]), containing a jump part, therefore allowing for jumps in this instrument price to be taken into account. In turn, the interest rate dynamics are in the form of an arithmetic Brownian motion, proposed in the Merton interest rate model of 1973 (see, e.g., [
21]). Therefore, in contrast to continuous underlying asset price models with deterministic interest rates, frequently observed in the literature, both stochastic processes could accurately reflect financial market behaviour. The Dupire formula, covering the case considered in this paper, was derived in a simplified way, without the formal application of distributions, by Benhamou et al. [
20]. The mentioned formula, leaving aside the question of distributions, is mathematically equivalent to the one we obtained in this paper. Our approach, based on a theorem strictly proved in [
14], includes the verification of all the necessary assumptions and uses advanced mathematical finance methods and stochastic analysis techniques to obtain the Dupire formula for the European call option.
Moreover, we present the possibility of applying the minimal entropy martingale measure as the risk-neutral measure in the case of a jump-diffusion model for the underlying asset price and a constant instantaneous interest rate to obtain the Dupire formula based on the market parameters with respect to the physical probability measure
. The resulting Dupire formula is a slight generalisation (without assuming the form of the distribution of the jumps in the price of an underlying instrument) of its counterpart derived in [
14], which was based on the parameters with respect to the risk-neutral measure
. This formula was also obtained in other settings, in [
7,
9]. However, in this paper, we additionally show how the corresponding parameters with respect to measure
can be used in the resulting Dupire formula under the assumption that the risk-neutral probability measure
is the minimal entropy martingale measure.
The Dupire formulas derived in this paper are based on the approach proposed in [
14], where distribution-valued stochastic processes were used as a consequence of technical difficulties in applying the classical analytical methods for the non-differentiable option’s pay-off function. In particular, in the mentioned paper, to prove the generalised Dupire formula applied in this paper, a version of the Tanaka formula in the space of distributions was proved and used.
This paper is organised as follows.
Section 2 presents the preliminaries concerning a discussion on applying differential equations to option pricing, notions used in the following parts of the paper concerning distributions, and stochastic integration with respect to a compensated random measure, as well as the theorems used in the following sections, including the generalised Dupire equation for the Margrabe option. In
Section 3, we derive and prove the Dupire formula for the European call option under the assumptions of the stochastic models of the underlying asset and instantaneous interest rate.
Section 4 is devoted to the application of the minimal entropy martingale measure to the case of the Dupire formula for the European option, where a jump-diffusion model of the underlying asset price and a constant instantaneous interest rate are assumed. In
Section 5, we present a numerical example of applying the Dupire formula in [
20], for a case similar to the one considered in this paper. Finally,
Section 6 contains some concluding remarks.
2. Preliminaries
This section contains the appropriate notations, definitions, and theorems concerning the theories of distributions and stochastic integration, as well as the generalised Dupire formula, which was proved in [
14] and used in our main theorem. We begin with a discussion on the application of differential equations to option pricing.
2.1. Application of Differential Equations to Option Pricing
Apart from a strictly probabilistic approach, including the application of methods of stochastic analysis, partial differential Equations (PDEs) play a key role in the valuation of derivative financial instruments. The first essential papers in this area were written by Black and Scholes [
22] and Merton [
23]. Since the publication of these papers, the theory of valuing options and other derivatives has been developed, and generalisations of previously used models have been introduced. Solutions of backward PDEs, with time and the underlying asset’s price as variables, were used to obtain option prices. For continuous models of the underlying assets’ prices, the application of backward PDEs for valuing various types of options, including path-dependent ones, was discussed, e.g., in [
21,
24,
25].
In the case of the underlying asset’s price model with jumps, the counterpart of a PDE is a partial integro-differential Equation (PIDE) (see, e.g., [
7,
26]).
The pricing method mentioned above has also been recently generalised and applied to the case of defaultable derivatives, with pay-offs at random (stopping) times (see [
27,
28]).
A backward pricing equation enables us to obtain the price of a financial derivative for a given maturity and striking price. In turn, by solving the Dupire Equation (1) (or its generalisation), which is a forward equation, one obtains the prices of an option for various striking prices and maturities in the considered case of the underlying asset (see, e.g., [
9]). The local volatility approach initially enabled the exact calibration of the Black–Scholes model to the volatility surface (see, e.g., [
29]). The Dupire equation has also been successfully applied to other types of options and is a useful tool in financial practice.
2.2. Basic Notations
Let , , , and be the set of real numbers, the -algebra of Borel subsets of , the set of non-negative real numbers, and the set of positive integers, respectively.
The indicator function of a set A will be denoted by .
For a non-empty open set
, we denote by
the space of locally integrable functions on
; by
the space of
-functions of compact support in
, being the test function space of general (also called Schwartz) distributions; and by
the space of general distributions, i.e., the space of all continuous linear functionals on
. For details concerning the topologies on
and
, we refer the reader to [
30].
If
, both sets are open,
is non-empty, and
is a continuous linear function which assigns to an element of
its continuation by 0 to
, then, we introduce a function
given by
and the following notation
We also introduce the following functions:
for
.
Finally, we recall the definition of the notion of a finite transition kernel.
Definition 1. For measurable spaces and , a mapping is said to be a finite transition kernel (from to ), if the following conditions hold:
- (i)
is -measurable for an arbitrary .
- (ii)
is a finite measure on for an arbitrary .
2.3. Lévy-Itô Stochastic Integrals
The theory of real stochastic processes is presented, e.g., by Protter [
31].
Let be a filtered probability space fulfilling the usual conditions, and . Let be the expected value with respect to .
We will use Lévy-type stochastic integrals as models of the considered underlying assets. Therefore, we present some elements of the theory concerning these stochastic processes.
We use definitions from [
32] to introduce the notion of a Lévy process and the associated measures. Let a stochastic process
taking values in
be a Lévy process, i.e., it is a cádlág, stochastically continuous,
-adapted process which has stationary, independent increments, and
a.s.
We use the symbol
to denote the measure on
given by
for
,
, called
the jump measure of (or
the Poisson random measure associated with ), where
and
is the
-algebra of Borel subsets of
and
, respectively.
The following measure
on
for
is called
the Lévy measure of . The
compensated jump measure of (or the
compensated Poisson random measure associated with ) is defined by
Furthermore, we assume that measure
is finite.
We present some definitions and facts concerning the theory of stochastic integration with respect to a compensated Poisson random measure of real functions discussed in [
33], adapting them to the case of the finite time horizon
.
The symbol will be used to denote the -algebra of subsets of , generated by mappings fulfilling the following conditions:
- (a)
For an arbitrary , the mapping is -measurable.
- (b)
For an arbitrary , the mapping is left-continuous.
A process
is said to be predictable if it is
-measurable (see [
33] (Def. 3.2.1)).
Let
be the space of predictable processes
satisfying, for each
, the inequality
Then, [
33] (Thm. 3.2.27) implies that for each
, there exists a stochastic integral of
V with respect to
q, with the notation
, as well as
or
(in the shortened form), being a square-integrable random variable.
We assume
without loss of generality. For
,
, and
, process
, and we use the notation
It was proved in [
33] (see Thm. 3.3.2) that for all
,
and
,
- (i)
- (ii)
- (iii)
;
- (iv)
has a cádlág modification, being a square-integrable martingale.
In the following part of the paper, we will treat the integrals of with respect to q as cádlág processes.
Moreover, under the assumption
for
(which is always satisfied in this paper), by [
33] (Proposition 3.4.5), it is possible to consider the integral of
with respect to
and for an arbitrary
A real semimartingale
is called a Lévy-type stochastic integral (a particular case of a Lévy-type stochastic integral defined in [
34]), if it is described by the formula
for
,
,
,
, and the
m-dimensional Brownian motion
, independent of
, where
is the space of all predictable processes
satisfying the inequality
We will use the following version of Itô’s lemma from [
34] (Thm. 4.4.7) in a one-dimensional case with the finite time horizon
.
Theorem 1. Let be a Lévy-type stochastic integral given by (4). Then, for each , , a.s.where is the continuous part of X. 2.4. Generalised Version of the Dupire Formula for the Margrabe Option
In this subsection, we present the generalisation of the Dupire formula, established in [
14] for the Margrabe option in the Lévy-type stochastic integral setting.
All the stochastic processes and random variables used in this subsection are defined on a filtered probability space with , , fulfilling the usual conditions. We additionally consider the associated risk-neutral probability measure equivalent to .
A stochastic process , being a numeraire, describes the time value of money, where is the instantaneous risk-free interest rate.
We also consider stochastic processes , , , , and , modelling the asset price, where a.s., , Thus, processes and correspond to the discounted values of N and Y, respectively, and S models the “exchange rate” between them.
Moreover, in the approach presented in [
14],
and
are Lévy-type stochastic integrals of the form described with respect to
by the following:
for the standard Brownian motions
independent of
, with
,
,
,
, and
,
,
q,
,
described in
Section 2.3 with respect to
, and the following inequality holds.
In the formula above,
denotes the expected value with respect to
.
The differential of
with respect to
is described by
where
We will also use the following auxiliary functions.
It was proved in [
14] that the integrals describing
are well defined.
According to the theory of pricing financial derivatives, it follows that the no-arbitrage time-zero price of a contingent claim
H is equal to the expected value with respect to
of its pay-off discounted by
.
H, in the considered case of the Margrabe option, is regarded as the European option to exchange the asset with the price modelled by
Y for
k units of the asset described by the price process
N. We assume the existence of the risk-neutral probability measure
, and therefore, the no-arbitrage price
at time zero of the contingent claim
H with maturity
is given by the following:
By [
14] (Lemma 3.1), the function
of the form
belongs to
, and therefore,
is an element of
.
Let denote the Lebesgue measure on the -algebra of Lebesgue subsets of .
The generalised Dupire formula, derived and proved in [
14], is formulated in the following theorem.
Theorem 2. Under the assumptions that the stochastic processes , , and are given by (6), (7), and (9) and the inequality (8) is satisfied,in . In the equation above, is the finite transition kernel from to given by (12), and is interpreted as the finite measure on such that (13) holds. We also use the notation for the expected values with respect to the probability measures defined by the formula For the probability distribution
of
with respect to
, the following equality in
is fulfilled:
and
represents a transition kernel from
to
. Moreover,
describes a finite measure on
and we have
.
Remark 1. The Dupire Equation (11) in can be formulated as follows:for an arbitrary -valued - function f on of compact support in . 3. The Dupire Formula for the Merton Model with Stochastic Interest Rate
This section is devoted to deriving the Dupire formula for the Merton model (1976) (see [
35]) of the underlying asset with stochastic interest rate. To this end, we apply Theorem 2 in the case of the mentioned model. We also use the theory of pricing contingent claims and the theory from [
21], and we adapt the form of the equation of the underlying asset formulated in [
7] (Eqn. (1)) to our setting (see (21)).
We denote by the symbol
the risk-free instantaneous interest rate (or spot interest rate), described by an adapted stochastic process with sample paths integrable on
with respect to the Lebesgue measure
a.s., by the symbol
an adapted process of finite variation and with continuous sample paths of the form
called
a savings account, and by the symbol
,
, adapted processes, where
the price at time
s of a zero-coupon bond of maturity
t.
We assume that
,
is an arbitrage-free family of bond prices relative to
r, i.e., the following conditions hold (see [
21] (Def. 9.5.1)):
- (a)
, .
- (b)
There exists a probability measure on (called a spot martingale measure for the family ) equivalent to such that for each process , , is a -martingale.
The existence of a spot martingale measure
for the family
implies the absence of arbitrage opportunities between bonds and a savings account (see [
21]). Moreover, the following equality holds (see [
21] (Eqn. 9.14))
where
is the expectation with respect to
. To preclude the possibility of arbitrage, we will also assume that the considered asset price discounted by
B is a
-martingale for
.
Apart from a spot martingale measure, we will also consider, for
, a probability measure
on
equivalent to
(called the forward martingale measure for the settlement date
t), described by the Radon–Nikodým derivative as follows (see [
21] (Def. 9.6.2))
The expected value with respect to will be denoted by .
We will assume that with respect to the probability measure
, the price process
S and the discounted price process
of the underlying asset take the form
respectively, for sufficiently regular parameters. Then, by Theorem 1
To ensure that
is a
- martingale, we should have
Thus,
and for sufficiently regular parameters,
is the solution of the equation
Therefore,
S can be written in the form
where
is the solution of (18).
Theorem 3. Let, under , the instantaneous interest rate and the underlying asset price be described by the Merton model of 1973 and 1976, respectively,where the real numbers and satisfy the inequalities , are continuous functions ( is called the local volatility), - (i)
For l-a.e. , .
- (ii)
For l-a.e. , .
, is the Poisson random measure associated with the Lévy process, which is the compound Poisson process independent of W; has a constant rate ; the normal distribution of jumps with the mean and variance ; and . Then, the Dupire formula for has the following form in : Proof. By [
21] (p. 385) for
,
, where
has a normal distribution with the expected value
and the variance
. As stated in [
36], if a random variable
V has a normal distribution with the expected value
and the variance
, then,
has a log-normal distribution with moments given by the formula
and therefore, for
and
,
and
Thus, for
and
,
and
By [
37] (Thm. 3.1) and conditions (i) and (ii), Equation (18) for
, has a unique solution and
where
. Therefore, by Hölder’s inequality
We also have
and
Moreover, there exists
, such that
since these integrals are finite. We also have
by Theorem 1.
And
We also have for
,
and, similarly to [
9,
14],
Additionally, by (i), (27)–(34),
Thus, condition (8) is fulfilled. The above equalities and Theorem 2 imply (22). □
4. Dupire Formula for Jump-Diffusion and Constant Interest Rate with the Application of the Minimal Entropy Martingale Measure
As previously, we assume that the filtered probability space satisfies the usual assumptions.
In this section, we will assume that the instantaneous interest rate is constant. In this case, for some real market parameters, including the distribution of jumps in the price of the underlying asset with respect to the initial probability measure
, it is possible to use the minimal entropy martingale measure as the risk-neutral measure and obtain the Dupire formula for
of this form. The strengths of using this measure in pricing financial derivatives are presented, inter alia, in [
38] (Subsect. 7.4).
Let
denote a geometric Lévy process of the form
modelling the underlying asset price, for a Lévy process
. Let
r be a constant instantaneous interest rate and
represent the discounted price of the underlying asset. In the equivalent martingale measure method (see, e.g., [
38]), one has to find a risk-neutral probability measure
on
equivalent to
such that
is a
-martingale (we will call it an
equivalent martingale measure). For pricing purposes, one should describe the form of process
with respect to
. Then, the price process
of a European option with a pay-off function
is given by
We recall the basic notions and a fact presented in [
38] concerning the minimal entropy martingale measure.
We use the symbol
to denote the relative entropy of
with respect to
(both defined on
) described by the formula
where the notation
means that
is absolutely continuous with respect to
. If for an equivalent martingale measure
, the following inequality holds
for an arbitrary equivalent martingale measure
, then, we call
the
minimal entropy martingale measure (MEMM) of
.
From the theory presented in [
38] (Subsect. 7.2.1), it follows that if with respect to
,
where
,
is the standard Brownian motion, and
is a compound Poisson process with an intensity
and the Lévy measure
for a probability distribution
on
with
. Then, the existence of a solution
of the equation
implies
- (i)
The existence of the MEMM of .
- (ii)
The following form of
with respect to
where
is a compound Poisson process with the intensity
and the Lévy measure
for the probability distribution
on
.
Adapting the notation above to the setting in
Section 2.4, we have
,
,
and
,
for
.
By Theorem 1 and (37),
Therefore, proceeding as in the proof of [
14] (Thm. 4.1), we obtain the Dupire formula in
in the considered case, as follows:
i.e., in the form as in [
14] (Eqn. (70)) with
in [
14] replaced by
and, similarly as in the previous section,
, where
fulfil the assumptions as in Theorem 3.
The same formula was also obtained (without the considerations concerning the application of the MEMM) in [
9] as a special case of the Dupire formula for semimartingales.
5. Numerical Example
As mentioned earlier, our paper aims to derive the Dupire formula in a mathematically rigorous way under the assumption that the price of the underlying instrument and the spot interest rate are described by the Merton models of 1976 and 1973, respectively. This results in the Dupire equation in the space of distributions. Because of this, numerical computations using the mentioned formula require additional advanced research. However, to present a numerical illustration of the application of the Dupire formula for the Merton jump-diffusion model of an underlying asset with a constant instantaneous interest rate and the effect of replacing this interest rate with its stochastic counterpart, we will recall some results of computations from [
20], where a similar case to the one considered in this paper was discussed, although less formally, excluding the verification of certain assumptions. Since the authors did not use the distributional approach, we will write selected formulas from the aforementioned paper as they are presented, preserving the notation used there with some minor changes and corrections.
We will use the symbols , , and to denote the risk-free rate available at time t, the price of a zero-coupon bond with maturity at time t, and the expectation under the forward measure, respectively.
The price process of the underlying asset is given by the following extension of the model considered in [
7] to include a stochastic
, as follows:
where
is the dividend rate,
is the Brownian motion;
is a log-normally distributed jump magnitude with the mean
and standard deviation
;
is a Poisson process with intensity
; and
,
,
, and
are independent. We will use the symbols
and
to denote, respectively, the local volatility of the hybrid model, i.e., with stochastic
for the maturity T and strike K, and its counterpart with deterministic
. Using the Dupire formula [
7] (Eqn. (4)), the authors obtained
and proved (see [
20] (Proposition 2.1)) that
where
and
are the stochastic and deterministic interest rates used in (39).
5.1. Local Volatility for Constant Interest Rate
The authors of [
20] considered the Eurostoxx 50 index. In the beginning, the implied Black–Scholes volatility for this index, presented in
Table 1 (see [
20] (Table 1)), was obtained, where strikes are presented as percentages of the initial spot.
The implied volatility was then smoothened with application of the two-step parabolic function. For a fixed value of
K, the best fitting parabola of the form
. Then, the parabolas in strikes by determining the following values:
were obtained, using least square minimization. In the next step, formula (40) was estimated with different parameters as described in [
7], and it was applied to compute the local volatility surface given in
Table 2 (see [
20] (Table 2)).
Table 2 shows that “volatility smiles” are especially noticeable for short-term maturities.
5.2. Impact of Stochastic Interest Rate on Local Volatility
It is assumed that
for a deterministic
, the standard Brownian motion
,
, and a constant
. To obtain
, the ATM cap volatility was used. The results are presented in
Table 3 (see [
20] (Table 3)).
In turn, to obtain , the authors used the correlation obtained by computation on two years of weekly data between the Eurostoxx 50 index and the 2Y swap rate.
The local volatility for the hybrid model (with stochastic interest rates) was approximated iteratively by a fixed point iteration procedure described in [
20] (Sub-Section 2c). Three iterations of this procedure and the following formulas were applied:
The results are presented in
Table 4 (see [
20] (Table 6)).
Finally, the impact of the stochastic interest rates is computed by the formula
and the results are presented in
Table 5 (see [
20] (Table 7)).
From
Table 5, it follows that, for the considered data, the bias becomes greater for longer maturities. In particular, the impact is significant (greater than 3%) for 10-year maturity.