FINITE-DIFFERENCE BISECTION ALGORITHMS FOR FREE BOUNDARIES OF AMERICAN OPTIONS

This paper presents two algorithms based on the Jamshidian equation which is from the Black-Scholes partial differential equation. The first algorithm is for American call options and the second one is for American put options. They compute numerically free boundary and then option price, iteratively, because the free boundary and the option price are coupled implicitly. By the upwind finite-difference scheme, we discretize the Jamshidian equation with respect to asset variable s and set up a linear system whose solution is an approximation to the option value. Using the property that the coefficient matrix of this linear system is an M-matrix, we prove several theorems in order to formulate a bisection method, which generates a sequence of intervals converging to the fixed interval containing the free boundary value with error bound h. These algorithms have the accuracy of O(k + h), where k and h are step sizes of variables t and s, respectively. We prove that they are unconditionally stable. We applied our algorithms for a series of numerical experiments and compared them with other algorithms. Our algorithms are efficient and applicable to options with such constraints as r ＞ d, r ≤ d, long-time or short-time maturity T.