Optimal stopping and perpetual options for Lévy processes

Abstract.

Consider a model of a financial market with a stock driven by a Lévy process and constant interest rate. A closed formula for prices of perpetual American call options in terms of the overall supremum of the Lévy process, and a corresponding closed formula for perpetual American put options involving the infimum of the after-mentioned process are obtained. As a direct application of the previous results, a Black-Scholes type formula is given. Also as a consequence, simple explicit formulas for prices of call options are obtained for a Lévy process with positive mixed-exponential and arbitrary negative jumps. In the case of put options, similar simple formulas are obtained under the condition of negative mixed-exponential and arbitrary positive jumps. Risk-neutral valuation is discussed and a simple jump-diffusion model is chosen to illustrate the results.