Pricing a Call with Multiple Brownian Volatility Drivers
Summary
The document shows why a standard Black–Scholes call formula can still apply when a stock is driven by several independent Brownian motions. If the stock’s volatility coefficients form a vector, their combined diffusion can be represented by a single Brownian motion scaled by the vector’s Euclidean norm. The stock therefore behaves as a geometric Brownian motion with effective volatility equal to that norm.
The explanation establishes the combined process by checking that it is a continuous martingale with unit quadratic variation, then invokes Lévy’s characterization of Brownian motion. It also gives a distribution-based argument: the sum of independent normal increments is normal, with variance equal to the sum of the component variances. This supports using the usual call pricing result for the modeled stock. The reasoning assumes the stated constant volatility coefficients and independent Brownian drivers; correlations or time-varying coefficients require corresponding adjustments.
Key ideas
- A stock exposed to multiple independent Brownian drivers has an effective volatility equal to the norm of its volatility vector.
- A normalized linear combination of the drivers is a standard one-dimensional Brownian motion.
- The resulting stock process has the usual geometric Brownian motion form.
- The same conclusion follows from the normal distribution of the combined diffusion term.
- The argument assumes constant coefficients and independent Brownian motions.
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Full text
# How to price a call option which depends on two Wiener processes?
# How to price a call option which depends on two Wiener processes?
Could someone explain to me why the regular call pricing formula works, just with $\sigma$ replaced by $\|\sigma\|$ in the case where the underlying asset depends on two Wiener processes?
For example, we might have had a model with two risky assets, and therefore two Wiener processes, in order to ensure no-arbitrage and completeness. And then we may be interested in a call option on only one of these stocks.
I am reading my textbook, and in it, it merely uses the regular formula for call option pricing, except it takes a norm of the two-dimensional volatility vector. But, it does not prove why this is the correct approach.
EDIT: Here's the picture of the text:
As you can see, he merely plugs in $\sigma_{S^f}$ (two-dimensional) in place of $\sigma$, in the regular call price formula, which is given as follows:
## Answer by LocalVolatility (score 3)
https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/32557
Let $\sigma \in \mathbb{R}_n^n$ and let $W$ be an n-dimensional standard Brownian motion. Define a new one-dimensional process $\tilde{W}$ by
\begin{equation} \tilde{W}_t = \frac{1}{\vert \vert \sigma \vert \vert} \sum_{i = 1}^n \sigma_i W_t^{(i)}. \end{equation}
Then it is easy to show that $\tilde{W}$ is a continuous martingale, starting at $\tilde{W}_0 = 0$ and with quadratic variation $\mathrm{d} \langle \tilde{W} \rangle_t = \mathrm{d}t$. It follows by Levy's characterization theorem that $\tilde{W}$ is a standard one-dimensional Brownian motion. Consequently, $S$ follows a geometric Brownian motion with respect to $\tilde{W}$ and diffusion coefficient $\vert \vert \sigma \vert \vert$, i.e
\begin{eqnarray} \mathrm{d}S_t & = & r S_t \mathrm{d}t + S_t \sum_{i = 1}^n \sigma_i \mathrm{d}W_t^i\\ & = & r S_t \mathrm{d}t + \vert \vert \sigma \vert \vert S_t \mathrm{d}\tilde{W}_t, \end{eqnarray}
and the usual Black-Scholes result applies.
Alternatively, you could note that
\begin{equation} \sum_{i = 1}^n \sigma_i W_t^{(i)} \end{equation}
is a sum of $n$ independent normal random variables. Thus, it is normally distributed with mean zero and variance
\begin{equation} \sum_{i = 1}^n \sigma_i^2 t = \vert \vert \sigma \vert \vert^2 t. \end{equation}
Consequently,
\begin{equation} \ln S_t \sim \mathcal{N} \left( S_0 + \left( r - \frac{1}{2} \vert \vert \sigma \vert \vert^2 \right) t, \vert \vert \sigma \vert \vert^2 t\right) \end{equation}
and again the usual Black-Scholes analysis applies.Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.