Static versus Dynamic Arbitrage Bounds on Multivariate Option Prices

Abstract

We compare static arbitrage price bounds on basket calls, i.e. bounds that only involve buy-and-hold trading strategies, with the price range obtained within a multi-variate generalization of the Black-Scholes model. While there is no gap between these two sets of prices in the univariate case, we observe here that contrary to our intuition about model risk for at-the-money calls, there is a somewhat large gap between model prices and static arbitrage prices, hence a similarly large set of prices on which a multivariate Black-Scholes model cannot be calibrated but where no conclusion can be drawn on the presence or not of a static arbitrage opportunity.