Time-Changed Levy Process and Option Pricing

Abstract

We apply stochastic time change to Levy processes to generate a wide variety of tractable option pricing models. In particular, we prove a fundamental theorem that transforms the characteristic function of the time-changed Levy process into the Laplace transform of the stochastic time under appropriate measure change. We extend the traditional measure theory into the complex domain and define the measure change by a class of complex valued exponential martingales. We provide extensive examples to illustrate its applications and its link to existing models in the literature.