A Power Penalty Approach to Numerical Solutions of Two-Asset American Options

Abstract

This paper aims to develop a power penalty method for a linear parabolic variational inequality (VI) in two spatial dimensions governing the two-asset American option valuation. This method yields a two-dimensional nonlinear parabolic PDE containing a power penalty term with penalty constant $\lambda > 1$ and a power parameter $k>0$. We show that the nonlinear PDE is uniquely solvable and the solution of the PDE converges to that of the VI at the rate of order $O( \lambda^{-k/2}) $. A fitted finite volume method is designed to solve the nonlinear PDE, and some numerical experiments are performed to illustrate the usefulness of this method.