Option Pricing With An Illiquid Underlying Asset Market

We examine how price impact in the underlying asset market affects the replication of a European contingent claim. We obtain a generalized Black-Scholes pricing PDE and establish the existence and uniqueness of a classical solution to this PDE. Unlike the case with transaction costs, we prove that replication with price impact is always cheaper than superreplication. Compared to the Black-Scholes case, a trader generally buys more stock and borrows more (shorts and lends more) to replicate a call (put). Furthermore, price impact implies endogenous stochastic volatility and an out-of-money option has lower implied volatility than an in-the-money option. This finding has important implications for empirical analysis on volatility smile. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved