An Effective Hybrid Variance Reduction Method for Pricing the Asian Options and its Variants

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a variance reduction method that combines importance sampling and control variates to price European Arithmetic Asian options and its variants (i.e., Asian options plus knock-in or knock-out options) under the Black-Scholes model. The numerical results show that the proposed methods are especially efficient under the following scenarios: in the money, low volatility, more sampling dates, and higher barrier thresholds.