Barrier Option Pricing with Model Averaging Methods under Local Volatility Models

In this paper, we propose a method to provide the distribution of option price under local volatility model when market-provided implied volatility data are given. The local volatility model is one of the most widely used smile-consistent models. In local volatility model, the volatility is a deterministic function of the random stock price. Before estimating local volatility surface (LVS), we need to estimate implied volatility surfaces (IVS) from market data. To do this we use local polynomial smoothing method. Then we apply the Dupire formula to estimate the resulting LVS. However, the result is dependent on the bandwidth of kernel function employed in local polynomial smoothing method and to solve this problem, the proposed method in this paper makes use of model averaging approach by means of bandwidth priors, and then produces a robust local volatility surface estimation with a confidence interval. After constructing LVS, we price barrier option with the LVS estimation through Monte Carlo simulation. To show the merits of our proposed method, we have conducted experiments on simulated and market data which are relevant to KOSPI200 call equity linked warrants (ELWs.) We could show by these experiments that the results of the proposed method are quite reasonable and acceptable when compared to the previous works.