Improved Radial Basis Function Methods for Multi-Dimensional Option Pricing

Ulrika Pettersson, Elisabeth Larsson, Gunnar Marcusson, and Jonas Persson

May 2006

Abstract:

In this paper, we have derived a radial basis function (RBF) based method for the pricing of financial contracts by solving the Black-Scholes partial differential equation. As an example of a financial contract that can be priced with this method we have chosen the multi-dimensional European basket call option. We have shown numerically that our scheme is second order accurate in time and spectrally accurate in space for constant shape parameter. For other, non-optimal choices of shape parameter values, the resulting convergence rate is algebraic. We propose an adaptive node point placement that improves the accuracy compared with a uniform distribution. Compared with an adaptive finite difference method, the RBF method is 20-40 times faster in one and two space dimensions and has approximately the same memory requirements.

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