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Lean Trees—A General Approach for Improving Performance of Lattice Models for Option Pricing

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Abstract

The well-known binomial and trinomial tree models for option pricing are examined from the point of view of numerical efficiency. Common lattices use a large part of time resources for calculations which are almost irrelevant for the solution. To avoid this waste of resources, the tree is reduced to a “lean” form which yields the same order of convergence, but with a reduction of numerical effort. In numerical tests it is shown that the proposed method leads to a significant improvement in real calculation time without loss of accuracy for a broad class of derivatives.

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Correspondence to Marco Wilkens.

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Baule, R., Wilkens, M. Lean Trees—A General Approach for Improving Performance of Lattice Models for Option Pricing. Review of Derivatives Research 7, 53–72 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:REDR.0000017028.57712.19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:REDR.0000017028.57712.19

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