216 Chapter 5
and Scholes formula with information related to the economic, financial and even
political environment provided it can be modelled by an ergodic homogeneous
Markov chain.
This model also gives the possibility of taking into account anticipations made
by the investors in such a way as to incorporate them in their own option pricing
and can also be used for models with financial crashes as well as to construct
scenarios and particularly in the case of stress in a VaR type approach.
11 THE EXTENSION OF THE BLACK-SCHOLES
PRICING FORMULA WITH A MARKOV
ENVIRONMENT: THE SEMI-MARKOVIAN JANSSEN-
MANCA-VOLPE FORMULA
11.1 Introduction
In this section, we present another semi-Markov extension of the Black and
Scholes formula to the so-called Janssen-Manca-Volpe model to eliminate one of
the restrictions of the Black and Scholes model that is the assumption of constant
volatility upon time.
If there have been a lot of attempts to slacken this condition, as for example in
the model of Hull and White (1985) where the concept of stochastic volatility is
introduced, nevertheless, to our knowledge, in practice, no generalised model
really supplants the classical Black and Scholes model.
Whilst comparing with the Markovian Janssen-Manca model of the preceding
section, we develop another type of model. More precisely we present new semi-
Markov models for the evolution of the volatility of the underlying asset.
In fact, the SM model presented here supposes a type of SM evolution for the
volatility of an initial Black-Scholes model presented for the first time in an oral
communication in the ETH Zurich (1995) by J. Janssen and in a different
approach by E. Çinlar in an oral communication at the First Euro-Japanese
meeting on Insurance, Finance and Reliability, held in Brussels in 1998, and
leading to a generalization of the classical Black and Scholes formula for the
pricing of European calls with easy numerical applications.
11.2 The Janssen-Manca-Çinlar Model
Hereby, we present our initial model of 1995 close to the oral presentation of
Çinlar but he gives the formula for the pricing of a call option using the Markov
renewal theory.