Journal of Applied Mathematics and Decision Sciences
Volume 3 (1999), Issue 1, Pages 63-73
doi:10.1155/S1173912699000048

Some applications of occupation times of Brownian motion with drift in mathematical finance

Andreas Pechtl

Center of Asset Pricing and Financial Products Development, Deutsche Genossenschaftsbank Frankfurt am Main, Am Platz der Republik, Frankfurt am Main D–60325, Germany

Copyright © 1999 Andreas Pechtl. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

In the last few years new types of path-dependent options called corridor options or range options have become well-known derivative instruments in European options markets. Since the payout profiles of those options are based on occupation times of the underlying security the purpose of this paper is to provide closed form pricing formulae of Black & Scholes type for some significant representatives. Alternatively we demonstrate in this paper a relatively simple derivation of the Black & Scholes price for a single corridor option – based on a static portfolio representation – which does not make use of the distribution of occupation times (of Brownian motion). However, knowledge of occupation times' distributions is a more powerful tool.