<p>Asian options are an important family of derivative contracts with a wide variety of applications in commodity, currency, energy, interest rate, equity and insurance markets. In this master's thesis, we investigate methods for evaluating the price of the Asian call options with a fixed strike. One of them is the Monte Carlo method. The accurancy of this method can be observed through variance of the price. We will see that the variance with using Monte Carlo method has to be decreased. The Variance Reduction technique is useful for this aim. We will give evidence of the efficiency of one of the Variance Reduction thechniques - Control Variate method - in a mathematical context and a numerical comparison with the ordinary Monte Carlo method.</p>

Asian options are an important family of derivative contracts with a wide variety of applications in commodity, currency, energy, interest rate, equity and insurance markets. In this master's thesis, we investigate methods for evaluating the price of the Asian call options with a fixed strike. One of them is the Monte Carlo method. The accurancy of this method can be observed through variance of the price. We will see that the variance with using Monte Carlo method has to be decreased. The Variance Reduction technique is useful for this aim. We will give evidence of the efficiency of one of the Variance Reduction thechniques - Control Variate method - in a mathematical context and a numerical comparison with the ordinary Monte Carlo method.

The probability that a sum of random variables (RVs) exceeds (respectively falls below) a given threshold, is often encountered in the performance analysis of wireless communication systems. Generally, a closed-form expression of the sum distribution does not exist and a naive Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is computationally expensive when dealing with rare events. An alternative approach is represented by the use of variance reduction techniques, known for their efficiency in requiring less computations for achieving the same accuracy requirement. For the right-tail region, we develop a unified hazard rate twisting importance sampling (IS) technique that presents the advantage of being logarithmic efficient for arbitrary distributions under the independence assumption. A further improvement of this technique is then developed wherein the twisting is applied only to the components having more impacts on the probability of interest than others. Another challenging problem is when the components are correlated and distributed according to the Log-normal distribution. In this setting, we develop a generalized hybrid IS scheme based on a mean shifting and covariance matrix scaling techniques and we prove that the logarithmic efficiency holds again for two particular instances. We also propose two unified IS approaches to estimate the left-tail of sums of independent positive RVs. The first applies to arbitrary distributions and enjoys the logarithmic efficiency criterion, whereas the second satisfies the bounded relative error criterion under a mild assumption but is only applicable to the case of independent and identically distributed RVs. The left-tail of correlated Log-normal variates is also considered. In fact, we construct an estimator combining an existing mean shifting IS approach with a control variate technique and prove that it possess the asymptotically vanishing relative error property. A further interesting problem is the left-tail estimation of sums of ordered RVs. Two estimators are presented. The first is based on IS and achieves the bounded relative error under a mild assumption. The second is based on conditional MC approach and achieves the bounded relative error property for the Generalized Gamma case and the logarithmic efficiency for the Log-normal case.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / This dissertation studies the computation methods of pricing of Asian options. Asian options are options in which the underlying variable is the average price over a period of time. Because of this, Asian options have a lower volatility and this render them cheaper relative to their European counterparts. Asian options belong to the so-called path-dependent derivatives; they are among the most difficult to price and hedge both analytically and numerically. In practice, it is only discrete Asian options that are traded, however continuous Asian options are used for studying purposes. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature, including Monte Carlo simulations, tree-based methods, Taylor’s expansion, partial differential equations, and analytical ap- proximations among others. When using partial differential equations for pricing of continuous time Asian options, the high dimensionality is problematic. In this dissertation we focus on the discrete time methods. We start off by explaining the binomial tree method, and our last chapter presents the very exciting and relatively simple method of Tsao and Huang, using Taylor approximations. The main papers that are used in this dissertation are articles by Jan Vecer (2001); LCG Rogers (1995); Eric Benhamou (2001); Gianluca Fusai (2007); Kamizono, Kariya and Nakatsuma (2006) and Tsao and Huang (2007). The author has provided computations, including graphs and tables dispersed over the different chapters, to demonstrate the utility of the methods. We observe various parameters of influence such as correlation, volatility, strike, etc. A further contribution by the author of this dissertation is, in particular, in Chapter 5, in the presentation of the work of Tsao et al. Here we have provided slightly more detailed explanations and again some further computational tables.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Cette thèse traite de la théorie du risque en finance et en assurance. La mise en pratique du concept de comonotonie, la dépendance du risque au sens fort, est décrite pour identifier l’optimum de Pareto et les allocations individuellement rationnelles Pareto optimales, la tarification des options et la quantification des risques. De plus, il est démontré que l’aversion au risque monotone à gauche, un raffinement pertinent de l’aversion forte au risque, caractérise tout décideur à la Yaari, pour qui, l’assurance avec franchise est optimale. Le concept de comonotonie est introduit et discuté dans le chapitre 1. Dans le cas de risques multiples, on adopte l’idée qu’une forme naturelle pour les compagnies d’assurance de partager les risques est la Pareto optimalité risque par risque. De plus, l’optimum de Pareto et les allocations individuelles Pareto optimales sont caractérisées. Le chapitre 2 étudie l’application du concept de comonotonie dans la tarification des options et la quantification des risques. Une nouvelle variable de contrôle de la méthode de Monte Carlo est introduite et appliquée aux “basket options”, aux options asiatiques et à la TVaR. Finalement dans le chapitre 3, l’aversion au risque au sens fort est raffinée par l’introduction de l’aversion au risque monotone à gauche qui caractérise l’optimalité de l’assurance avec franchise dans le modèle de Yaari. De plus, il est montré que le calcul de la franchise s’effectue aisément. / This thesis deals with the risk theory in Finance and Insurance. Application of the Comonotonicity concept, the strongest risk dependence, is described for identifying the Pareto optima and Individually Rational Pareto optima allocations, option pricing and quantification of risk. Furthermore it is shown that the left monotone risk aversion, a meaningful refinement of strong risk aversion, characterizes Yaari’s decision makers for whom deductible insurance is optimal. The concept of Comonotonicity is introduced and discussed in Chapter 1. In case of multiple risks, the idea that a natural way for insurance companies to optimally share risks is risk by risk Pareto-optimality is adopted. Moreover, the Pareto optimal and individually Pareto optimal allocations are characterized. The Chapter 2 investigates the application of the Comonotonicity concept in option pricing and quantification of risk. A novel control variate Monte Carlo method is introduced and its application is explained for basket options, Asian options and TVaR. Finally in Chapter 3 the strong risk aversion is refined by introducing the left-monotone risk aversion which characterizes the optimality of deductible insurance within the Yaari’s model. More importantly, it is shown that the computation of the deductible is tractable.