Valuation of two-factor options under the Merton jump-diffusion model using orthogonal spline wavelets

Abstract

This paper addresses the two-asset Merton model for option pricing represented by non-stationary integro-differential equations with two state variables. The drawback of most classical methods for solving these types of equations is that the matrices arising from discretization are full and ill-conditioned. In this paper, we first transform the equation using logarithmic prices, drift removal, and localization. Then, we apply the Galerkin method with a recently proposed orthogonal cubic spline-wavelet basis combined with the Crank-Nicolson scheme. We show that the proposed method has many benefits. First, as is well-known, the wavelet-Galerkin method leads to sparse matrices, which can be solved efficiently using iterative methods. Furthermore, since the basis functions are cubic splines, the method is higher-order convergent. Due to the orthogonality of the basis functions, the matrices are well-conditioned even without preconditioning, computation is simplified, and the required number of iterations is less than for non-orthogonal cubic spline-wavelet bases. Numerical experiments are presented for European-style options on the maximum of two assets.