IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wpa/wuwpfi/0409004.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

When Does Extra Risk Strictly Increase the Value of Options?

Author

Listed:
  • Eric Rasmusen

Abstract

It is well known that risk increases the value of options. This paper makes that precise in a new way. The conventional theorem says that the value of an option does not fall if the underlying option becomes riskier in the conventional sense of the mean-preserving spread. This paper uses two new definitions of ``riskier'' to show that the value of an option strictly increases (a) if the underlying asset becomes ``pointwise riskier,'' and (b) only if the underlying asset becomes ``extremum riskier.''

Suggested Citation

  • Eric Rasmusen, 2004. "When Does Extra Risk Strictly Increase the Value of Options?," Finance 0409004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
  • Handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpfi:0409004
    Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 20
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/fin/papers/0409/0409004.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bergman, Yaacov Z & Grundy, Bruce D & Wiener, Zvi, 1996. "General Properties of Option Prices," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(5), pages 1573-1610, December.
    2. Masaaki Kijima, 2002. "Monotonicity And Convexity Of Option Prices Revisited," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(4), pages 411-425, October.
    3. Robert C. Merton, 2005. "Theory of rational option pricing," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Sudipto Bhattacharya & George M Constantinides (ed.), Theory Of Valuation, chapter 8, pages 229-288, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    4. G. Hanoch & H. Levy, 1969. "The Efficiency Analysis of Choices Involving Risk," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 36(3), pages 335-346.
    5. Robert R. Bliss, 2000. "The pitfalls in inferring risk from financial market data," Working Paper Series WP-00-24, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    6. Cox, John C. & Ross, Stephen A., 1976. "The valuation of options for alternative stochastic processes," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 3(1-2), pages 145-166.
    7. Jagannathan, Ravi, 1984. "Call options and the risk of underlying securities," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 425-434, September.
    8. Hadar, Josef & Russell, William R, 1969. "Rules for Ordering Uncertain Prospects," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 59(1), pages 25-34, March.
    9. Merton, Robert C., 1976. "Option pricing when underlying stock returns are discontinuous," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 3(1-2), pages 125-144.
    10. Black, Fischer & Scholes, Myron S, 1973. "The Pricing of Options and Corporate Liabilities," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(3), pages 637-654, May-June.
    11. Yaacov Z. Bergman & Bruce D. Grundy & Zvi Wiener, "undated". "General Properties of Option Prices (Revision of 11-95) (Reprint 058)," Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research Working Papers 1-96, Wharton School Rodney L. White Center for Financial Research.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Eric Rasmusen, 2004. "Getting Carried Away in Auctions as Imperfect Value Discovery," Industrial Organization 0409001, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Eric Rasmusen, 2007. "When Does Extra Risk Strictly Increase an Option's Value?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(5), pages 1647-1667, 2007 14.
    2. Constantinides, George M. & Jackwerth, Jens Carsten & Perrakis, Stylianos, 2005. "Option pricing: Real and risk-neutral distributions," CoFE Discussion Papers 05/06, University of Konstanz, Center of Finance and Econometrics (CoFE).
    3. Norden, Lars, 2001. "Hedging of American equity options: do call and put prices always move in the direction as predicted by the movement in the underlying stock price?," Journal of Multinational Financial Management, Elsevier, vol. 11(4-5), pages 321-340, December.
    4. Chuang Yuang Lin & Dar Hsin Chen & Chin Yu Tsai, 2011. "The limitation of monotonicity property of option prices: an empirical evidence," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(23), pages 3103-3113.
    5. Alexander, Carol & Nogueira, Leonardo M., 2007. "Model-free hedge ratios and scale-invariant models," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 31(6), pages 1839-1861, June.
    6. Antonio Mele, 2003. "Fundamental Properties of Bond Prices in Models of the Short-Term Rate," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 16(3), pages 679-716, July.
    7. Lim, Terence & Lo, Andrew W. & Merton, Robert C. & Scholes, Myron S., 2006. "The Derivatives Sourcebook," Foundations and Trends(R) in Finance, now publishers, vol. 1(5–6), pages 365-572, April.
    8. GARCIA, René & RENAULT, Éric, 1998. "Risk Aversion, Intertemporal Substitution, and Option Pricing," Cahiers de recherche 9801, Universite de Montreal, Departement de sciences economiques.
    9. Hyong-Chol O & Ji-Sok Kim, 2013. "General Properties of Solutions to Inhomogeneous Black-Scholes Equations with Discontinuous Maturity Payoffs and Application," Papers 1309.6505, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2013.
    10. Alfredo Ibáñez, 2005. "Option-Pricing in Incomplete Markets: The Hedging Portfolio plus a Risk Premium-Based Recursive Approach," Computing in Economics and Finance 2005 216, Society for Computational Economics.
    11. José Fajardo & Ernesto Mordecki, 2006. "Skewness Premium with Lévy Processes," IBMEC RJ Economics Discussion Papers 2006-04, Economics Research Group, IBMEC Business School - Rio de Janeiro.
    12. Mele, Antonio, 2004. "General properties of rational stock-market fluctuations," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 24701, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    13. Yue, Tian & Zhang, Jin E. & Tan, Eric K.M., 2020. "The Chinese equity index options market," Emerging Markets Review, Elsevier, vol. 45(C).
    14. Robert R. Bliss, 2000. "The pitfalls in inferring risk from financial market data," Working Paper Series WP-00-24, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    15. Hildebrandt, Patrick & Knoke, Thomas, 2011. "Investment decisions under uncertainty--A methodological review on forest science studies," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 1-15, January.
    16. Juho Kanniainen & Robert Pich'e, 2012. "Stock Price Dynamics and Option Valuations under Volatility Feedback Effect," Papers 1209.4718, arXiv.org.
    17. René Garcia & Richard Luger & Eric Renault, 2000. "Asymmetric Smiles, Leverage Effects and Structural Parameters," Working Papers 2000-57, Center for Research in Economics and Statistics.
    18. Zura Kakushadze, 2016. "Volatility Smile as Relativistic Effect," Papers 1610.02456, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2017.
    19. Ghysels, E. & Harvey, A. & Renault, E., 1995. "Stochastic Volatility," Papers 95.400, Toulouse - GREMAQ.
    20. Lo, Andrew W & Wang, Jiang, 1995. "Implementing Option Pricing Models When Asset Returns Are Predictable," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 50(1), pages 87-129, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    options; risk; mean-preserving spread; calls;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G - Financial Economics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wpa:wuwpfi:0409004. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: EconWPA (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.