Pricing American Options: A Comparison of Monte Carlo Simulation Approaches∗

A number of Monte Carlo simulation-based approaches have been proposed within the past decade to address the problem of pricing American-style derivatives. The purpose of this paper is to empirically test some of these algorithms on a common set of problems in order to be able to assess the strengths and weaknesses of each approach as a function of the problem characteristics. In addition, we introduce another simulation-based approach that parameterizes the early exercise curve and casts the valuation problem as an optimization problem of maximizing the expected payoff (under the martingale measure) with respect to the associated parameters, the optimization problem carried out using a simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) algorithm.