Modeling and pricing European-style continuous-installment option under
the Heston’ stochastic volatility model: A PDE approach
Abstract
Installment options, as path-dependent contingent claims, involve paying
the premium discretely or continuously in installments, rather than as a
lump sum at the time of purchase. In this paper, we applied the PDE
approach to price European continuous-installment option and consider
Heston stochastic volatility model for the dynamics of the underlying
asset. We proved the existence and uniqueness of the weak solution for
our pricing problem based on the two-dimensional finite element method.
Due to the flexibility to continue or stop paying installments,
installment options pricing can be modeled as an optimal stopping time
problem. This problem is formulated as an equivalent free boundary
problem and then as a complementarity linear problem (LCP). We wrote the
resulted LCP in the form of a variational inequality and used the finite
element method for the discretization. Then the resulting time-dependent
LCPs are solved by using a projected successive over relaxation
iteration method. Finally, we implemented our numerical method. The
numerical results are verified the efficiency and usefulness of the
suggested method.