Valuation of exotic options under shortselling constraints

Abstract.

Options with discontinuous payoffs are generally traded above their theoretical Black–Scholes prices because of the hedging difficulties created by their large delta and gamma values. A theoretical method for pricing these options is to constrain the hedging portfolio and incorporate this constraint into the pricing by computing the smallest initial capital which permits super-replication of the option. We develop this idea for exotic options, in which case the pricing problem becomes one of stochastic control. Our motivating example is a call which knocks out in the money, and explicit formulas for this and other instruments are provided.