Bankruptcy Triggering Asset Value - Continuous Time Finance Approach

This paper utilizes means of game theory and option pricing to compute a bankruptcy triggering asset value. Combination of these two fields of economic study serves to separating the given problem into valuation of the payoffs, where we use option pricing and the analysis of strategic interactions between parties of a contract which could be designed and solved with the use of game theory. First of all, we design a contract between three parties each having a stake in the company, but with different rights reflected in the boundary conditions of the Black-Scholes equation. Then we will compute the values of debts and the whole value of the company. From here we directly compute the value of the firm’s equity and optimize it from the point of view of managing shareholders. The theoretically computed bankruptcy triggering asset value is then compared to the actual stock price. Depending on this relation, we may say whether the company is likely to go under or not. Such knowledge is an example of the use of computational methods in sell-side analysis. In addition, this article also provides reader with a real-life case study of the investment bank Bear Stearns and the optimal bankruptcy strategy in this particular case. As we will observe, the bankruptcy trigger computed in this example could have served as a good guide for predicting fall of this investment bank.