The most important application of the Itô calculus, derived from the Itô lemma, in financial mathematics is the pricing of options. The most famous result in this area is the Black-Scholes formulae for pricing European vanilla call and put options. As a consequence of the formulae, both in theoretical and practical applications, Robert Merton and Myron Scholes were awarded the Nobel Prize for E...

This paper presents a convergence analysis of Crank–Nicolson and Rannacher time-marching methods which are often used in finite difference discretizations of the Black–Scholes equations. Particular attention is paid to the important role of Rannacher’s startup procedure, in which one or more initial timesteps use backward Euler timestepping, to achieve second-order convergence for approximation...

Following an approach introduced by Lagnado and Osher (1997), we study Tikhonov regularization applied to an inverse problem important in mathematical finance, that of calibrating, in a generalized Black–Scholes model, a local volatility function from observed vanilla option prices. We first establish W 1,2 p estimates for the Black–Scholes and Dupire equations with measurable ingredients. Appl...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and compute the early exercise boundary for a class of nonlinear Black–Scholes equations with a nonlinear volatility which can be a function of the second derivative of the option price itself. A motivation for studying the nonlinear Black–Scholes equation with a nonlinear volatility arises from option pricing models taking into account e.g. nontrivial tr...