Markus Siebenmorgen

Christian Bayer, Markus Siebenmorgen, Raul Tempone

We consider the problem of pricing basket options in a multivariate Black Scholes or Variance Gamma model. From a numerical point of view, pricing such options corresponds to moderate and high dimensional numerical integration problems with non-smooth integrands. Due to this lack of regularity, higher order numerical integration techniques may not be directly available, requiring the use of methods like Monte Carlo specifically designed to work for non-regular problems. We propose to use the inherent smoothing property of the density of the underlying in the above models to mollify the payoff function by means of an exact conditional expectation. The resulting conditional expectation is unbiased and yields a smooth integrand, which is amenable to the efficient use of adaptive sparse grid cubature. Numerical examples indicate that the high-order method may perform orders of magnitude faster compared to Monte Carlo or Quasi Monte Carlo in dimensions up to 35.

Abdul-Lateef Haji-Ali, Helmut Harbrecht, Michael Peters et al.

This article is dedicated to the anisotropic sparse grid quadrature for functions which are analytically extendable into an anisotropic tensor product domain. Taking into account this anisotropy, we end up with a dimension independent error versus cost estimate of the proposed quadrature. In addition, we provide a novel and improved estimate for the cardinality of the underlying anisotropic index set. To validate the theoretical findings, we present several examples ranging from simple quadrature problems to diffusion problems on random domains. These examples demonstrate the remarkable convergence behaviour of the anisotropic sparse grid quadrature in applications.