Efficient Computation of Hedging Portfolios for Options with Discontinuous Payoffs

Abstract

We consider the problem of computing hedging portfolios for options that may have discontinuous payoffs, in the framework of diffusion models in which the number of factors may be larger than the number of Brownian motions driving the model. Extending the work of Fournié et al. (1999), as well as Ma and Zhang (2000), using integration by parts of Malliavin calculus, we find two representations of the hedging portfolio in terms of expected values of random variables that do not involve differentiating the payoff function. Once this has been accomplished, the hedging portfolio can be computed by simple Monte Carlo. We find the theoretical bound for the error of the two methods. We also perform numerical experiments in order to compare these methods to two existing methods, and find that no method is clearly superior to others.