Excerpt from Pricing American Options: A Duality Approach

The main practical contribution of this paper is a general algorithm for constructing upper and lower bounds on the true price of the option using any approximation to the option price. We show that our bounds are tight, so that if the initial approximation is close to the true price of the option, the bounds are also guaranteed to be close. In addition, we explicitly characterize the worst-case performance of the pricing bounds. The computation of the lower bound is straightforward and relies on simulating the suboptimal exercise strategy implied by the approximate option price. The upper bound is obtained by simulating a different stochastic process that is determined by choosing an appropriate supermartingale. We justify this procedure by representing the American option price as a solution of a dual minimization problem, which is the main theoretical result of this paper.

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