Evaluating American put options on zero-coupon bonds by a penalty method

In this paper, American put options on zero-coupon bonds are priced under a single factor model of short-term rate. The linear complementarity problem of the option value is solved numerically by a penalty method, by which the problem is transformed into a nonlinear PDE by adding a power penalty term. The solution of the penalized problem converges to that of the original problem. A numerical scheme is established by using the finite volume method and the corresponding stability and convergence are discussed. Numerical results are presented to show the usefulness of the method. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.