Multilevel dual approach for pricing American style derivatives

In this article we propose a novel approach to reduce the computational complexity of the dual method for pricing American options. We consider a sequence of martingales that converges to a given target martingale and decompose the original dual representation into a sum of representations that correspond to different levels of approximation to the target martingale. By next replacing in each representation true conditional expectations with their Monte Carlo estimates, we arrive at what one may call a multilevel dual Monte Carlo algorithm. The analysis of this algorithm reveals that the computational complexity of getting the corresponding target upper bound, due to the target martingale, can be significantly reduced. In particular, it turns out that using our new approach, we may construct a multilevel version of the well-known nested Monte Carlo algorithm of Andersen and Broadie (2004) that is, regarding complexity, virtually equivalent to a non-nested algorithm. The performance of this multilevel algorithm is illustrated by a numerical example

Pricing path-dependent Bermudan options using Wiener chaos expansion: an embarrassingly parallel approach

In this work, we propose a new policy iteration algorithm for pricing Bermudan options when the payoff process cannot be written as a function of a lifted Markov process. Our approach is based on a modification of the well-known Longstaff Schwartz algorithm, in which we basically replace the standard least square regression by a Wiener chaos expansion. Not only does it allow us to deal with a non Markovian setting, but it also breaks the bottleneck induced by the least square regression as the coefficients of the chaos expansion are given by scalar products on the L^2 space and can therefore be approximated by independent Monte Carlo computations. This key feature enables us to provide an embarrassingly parallel algorithm.Comment: The Journal of Computational Finance, Incisive Media, In pres

Simulation based policy iteration for American style derivatives --- A multilevel approach

This paper presents a novel approach to reduce the complexity of simulation based policy iteration methods for pricing American options. Typically, Monte Carlo construction of an improved policy gives rise to a nested simulation algorithm for the price of the American product. In this respect our new approach uses the multilevel idea in the context of the inner simulations required, where each level corresponds to a specific number of inner simulations. A thorough analysis of the crucial convergence rates in the respective multilevel policy improvement algorithm is presented. A detailed complexity analysis shows that a significant reduction in computational effort can be achieved in comparison to standard Monte Carlo based policy iteration

Unbiased Optimal Stopping via the MUSE

We propose a new unbiased estimator for estimating the utility of the optimal stopping problem. The MUSE, short for Multilevel Unbiased Stopping Estimator, constructs the unbiased Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) estimator at every stage of the optimal stopping problem in a backward recursive way. In contrast to traditional sequential methods, the MUSE can be implemented in parallel. We prove the MUSE has finite variance, finite computational complexity, and achieves $\epsilon$-accuracy with $O(1/\epsilon^2)$ computational cost under mild conditions. We demonstrate MUSE empirically in an option pricing problem involving a high-dimensional input and the use of many parallel processors.Comment: 39 pages, add several numerical experiments and technical results, accepted by Stochastic Processes and their Application