Optimal stopping behavior of equity-linked investment products with regime switching

In recent years, there is a growing interest in equity-linked investment products. The return credited to such product depends on the return of some underlying reference index. A prominent example is the equity-indexed annuities (EIAs). A special feature of many of the equity-linked products is that the holders are entitled the right to surrender the product prior to maturity. In this paper, we will study the optimal surrender time for a equity-linked product in a discrete-time setting. We assume that the market environment will switch among different regimes in a Markovian way, and the return of the reference index will have different distributions in different regimes. Assuming a CRRA preference, we have obtained the optimal surrender policy. Properties of the optimal surrender behavior, in particular the effect of regime switching, are examined. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.