Numerical Solutions of American Options with Dividends Using Finite Difference Methods

We study the Black-Scholes model for American options with dividends. We cast the problem as a free-boundary problem for heat equations and use transformations to rewrite the problem in linear complementarity form. We use explicit and implicit finite difference methods to obtain numerical solutions. We implement and test the methods on a particular example in MATLAB. The effects of dividend payments on option pricing are also considered