Revisiting Semidefinite Programming Approaches to Options Pricing: Complexity and Computational Perspectives

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of finding bounds on the prices of options depending on multiple assets without assuming any underlying model on the price dynamics but only the absence of arbitrage opportunities. We formulate this as a generalized moment problem and utilize the well-known moment-sum-of-squares hierarchy of Lasserre to obtain bounds on the range of the possible prices. A complementary approach (also from Lasserre) is employed for comparison. We present several numerical examples to demonstrate the viability of our approach. The framework we consider makes it possible to incorporate different kinds of observable data, such as moment information, as well as observable prices of options on the assets of interest. History: Accepted by Antonio Frangioni, area editor for Design & Analysis of Algorithms–Continuous. Funding: This work was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement [Grant 813211 (POEMA)]. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplementary Information [ https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2022.1220 ] or is available from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC ) at [ http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6602361 ].