Pricing American Parisian Options under General Time-Inhomogeneous Markov Models

Abstract: This paper develops general approaches for pricing various types of American-style Parisian options (down-in/-out, perpetual/finite-maturity) with general payoff functions based on continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) approximation under general 1D time-inhomogeneous Markov models. For the down-in types, by conditioning on the Parisian stopping time, we reduce the pricing problem to that of a series of vanilla American options with different maturities and their prices integrated with the distribution function of the Parisian stopping time yield the American Parisian down-in option price. This facilitates an efficient application of CTMC approximation to obtain the approximate option price by calculating the required quantities. For the perpetual down-in cases under time-homogeneous models, significant computational cost can be reduced. The down-out cases are more complicated, for which we use the state augmentation approach to record the excursion duration and then the approximate option price is obtained by solving a series of variational inequalities recursively with the Lemke's pivoting method. We show the convergence of CTMC approximation for all the types of American Parisian options under general time-inhomogeneous Markov models, and the accuracy and efficiency of our algorithms are confirmed with extensive numerical experiments.