Option Pricing and Hedging with Small Transaction Costs

An investor with constant absolute risk aversion trades a risky asset with general It\^o-dynamics, in the presence of small proportional transaction costs. In this setting, we formally derive a leading-order optimal trading policy and the associated welfare, expressed in terms of the local dynamics of the frictionless optimizer. By applying these results in the presence of a random endowment, we obtain asymptotic formulas for utility indifference prices and hedging strategies in the presence of small transaction costs.Comment: 20 pages, to appear in "Mathematical Finance

General indifference pricing with small transaction costs

We study the utility indifference price of a European option in the context of small transaction costs. Considering the general setup allowing consumption and a general utility function at final time T, we obtain an asymptotic expansion of the utility indifference price as a function of the asymptotic expansions of the utility maximization problems with and without the European contingent claim. We use the tools developed in [54] and [48] based on homogenization and viscosity solutions to characterize these expansions. Finally we study more precisely the example of exponential utilities, in particular recovering under weaker assumptions the results of [6].Comment: 43 page

2013 (Spring)

Abstracts of the talks given at the 2013 Spring Colloquium