Contingent claims with payoffs depending on finitely many asset prices are modeled as elements of a separable Hilbert space. Under fairly general conditions, including market completeness, it is shown that one may change measure to a reference measure under which asset prices are Gaussian and for which the family of Hermite polynomials serves as an orthonormal basis. Basis pricing synthesizes claim valuation and basis investment provides static hedging opportunities. For claims written as functions of a single asset price we infer from observed option prices the implicit prices of basis elements and use these to construct the implied equivalent martingale measure density with respect to the reference measure, which in this case is the Black-Scholes geometric Brownian motion model. Data on S&P 500 options from the Wall Street Journal are used to illustrate the calculations involved. On this illustrative data set the equivalent martingale measure deviates from the Black-Scholes model by relatively discounting the larger price movements with a compensating premia placed on the smaller movements.
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Publisher Info
Paper provided by Queen's University, Department of Economics in its series Working Papers with number
1158.
Length: 23 pages Date of creation: Jul 1994 Date of revision: Publication status: Published in Mathematical Finance, Vol. 4, No. 3 (July 1994), 223-245 Handle: RePEc:qed:wpaper:1158
Find related papers by JEL classification: G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing G13 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Contingent Pricing; Futures Pricing
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