This study of automatic wage adjustments to changes in price levels will do the following: (1) give the historical background of cost-of-living wage adjustments to changes in price levels; (2) show whether there is a need for adjusting wages to changes in price levels; (3) show whether or not industry can afford to pay wages that are automatically adjusted to changes in price levels; (4) list some of the contracts between labor and capital that contain an example of the automatic cost-of-living wage adjustment; (5) summarize the problem and draw conclusions from the study as a whole.

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In this dissertation, we consider the Hull-White term structure problem with the boundary value condition given as the payoff of a European bond option. We restrict ourselves to the case where the parameters of the Hull-White model are strictly positive constants and from the risk neutral valuation formula, we first derive simple closed–form expression for pricing European bond option in the Hull-White extended Vasicek model framework. As the European option can be exercised only on the maturity date, we then examine the case of early exercise opportunity commonly called American option. With the analytic representation of American bond option being very hard to handle, we are forced to resort to numerical experiments. To do it excellently, we transform the Hull-White term structure equation into the diffusion equation and we first solve it through implicit, explicit and Crank-Nicolson (CN) difference methods. As these standard finite difference methods (FDMs) require truncation of the domain from infinite to finite one, which may deteriorate the computational efficiency for American bond option, we try to build a CN method over an unbounded domain. We introduce an exact artificial boundary condition in the pricing boundary value problem to reduce the original to an initial boundary problem. Then, the CN method is used to solve the reduced problem. We compare our performance with standard FDMs and the results through illustration show that our method is more efficient and accurate than standard FDMs when we price American bond option. / Mathematical Sciences / (M.Sc. (Mathematics))

This thesis is concerned with the investigation of numerical methods for the solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equations arising in European and American option pricing with proportional transaction costs. We first consider the problem of computing reservation purchase and write prices of a European option in the model proposed by Davis, Panas and Zariphopoulou [19]. It has been shown [19] that computing the reservation purchase and write prices of a European option involves solving three different fully nonlinear HJB equations. In this thesis, we propose a penalty approach combined with a finite difference scheme to solve the HJB equations. We first approximate each of the HJB equations by a quasi-linear second order partial differential equation containing two linear penalty terms with penalty parameters. We then develop a numerical scheme based on the finite differencing in both space and time for solving the penalized equation. We prove that there exists a unique viscosity solution to the penalized equation and the viscosity solution to the penalized equation converges to that of the original HJB equation as the penalty parameters tend to infinity. We also prove that the solution of the finite difference scheme converges to the viscosity solution of the penalized equation. Numerical results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We extend the penalty approach combined with a finite difference scheme to the HJB equations in the American option pricing model proposed by Davis and Zarphopoulou [20]. Numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the theoretical findings.

In this dissertation, we consider the Hull-White term structure problem with the boundary value condition given as the payoff of a European bond option. We restrict ourselves to the case where the parameters of the Hull-White model are strictly positive constants and from the risk neutral valuation formula, we first derive simple closed–form expression for pricing European bond option in the Hull-White extended Vasicek model framework. As the European option can be exercised only on the maturity date, we then examine the case of early exercise opportunity commonly called American option. With the analytic representation of American bond option being very hard to handle, we are forced to resort to numerical experiments. To do it excellently, we transform the Hull-White term structure equation into the diffusion equation and we first solve it through implicit, explicit and Crank-Nicolson (CN) difference methods. As these standard finite difference methods (FDMs) require truncation of the domain from infinite to finite one, which may deteriorate the computational efficiency for American bond option, we try to build a CN method over an unbounded domain. We introduce an exact artificial boundary condition in the pricing boundary value problem to reduce the original to an initial boundary problem. Then, the CN method is used to solve the reduced problem. We compare our performance with standard FDMs and the results through illustration show that our method is more efficient and accurate than standard FDMs when we price American bond option. / Mathematical Sciences / (M.Sc. (Mathematics))