Financial/Actuarial Mathematics Seminar

Thursdays 3:10-4:00, 3088 East Hall



Pricing Options in Incomplete Equity Markets via the Instantaneous Sharpe Ratio

Virginia (Jenny) Young

Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan

October 25, 2007



Abstract

We develop a theory for pricing in incomplete equity markets by assuming that the investor issuing an unhedgeable derivative security requires compensation for this risk in the form of a pre-specified instantaneous Sharpe ratio. In this talk, we apply our method to price options on non-traded assets for which there is a traded asset that is correlated to the non-traded asset. We use comparison arguments to demonstrate that the price satisfies a number of desirable properties. In the associated paper, we apply our method to price options in the presence of stochastic volatility, but we will not present that work in the talk.
This is joint work with Erhan Bayraktar.


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