A model is developed for pricing volatility derivatives, such as variance swaps and volatility swaps under a continuous‐time Markov‐modulated version of the stochastic volatility (SV) model developed by Heston. In particular, it is supposed that the parameters of this version of Heston's SV model depend on the states of a continuous‐time observable Markov chain process, which can be interpreted as the states of an observable macroeconomic factor. The market considered is incomplete in general, and hence, there is more than one equivalent martingale pricing measure. The regime switching Esscher transform used by Elliott et al. is adopted to determine a martingale pricing measure for the valuation of variance and volatility swaps in this incomplete market. Both probabilistic and partial differential equation (PDE) approaches are considered for the valuation of volatility derivatives.
In this paper, we derive finite dimensional filters for certain exponential functionals of the state of a continuous-time linear Gaussian process. Apart from being of mathematical interest, these new filters have applications in the state reconstruction of doubly-stochastic autoregressive processes. We also derive similar filters for exponential functionals of the state of nonlinear Benes systems.
We introduce the notion of a non-linear expectation in spaces of Colombeau generalized functions and provide its characterization in terms of the upper expectation over a set of probability measures. We then study a fully non-linear backward stochastic differential equation in the Colombeau setting via its connection with the corresponding fully non-linear partial differential equation.
Using stochastic flows and the generalized differentiation formula of Bismut and Kunita, the change in cost due to a strong variation of an optimal control is explicitly calculated. Differentiating this expression gives a minimum principle in both the partially observed and stochastic open loop situations. In the latter case the equation satisfied by the adjoint process is obtained by applying a martingale representation result.