摘要

We investigate a degenerate parabolic variational inequality arising from optimal continuous exercise perpetual executive stock options. It is also shown in Qin et al. (Continuous-Exercise Model for American Call Options with Hedging Constraints, working paper, available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2757541) that to make this problem non-trivial the stock's growth rate must be no smaller than the discount rate. Well-posedness of the problem is established in Lai et al. (2015, Mathematical analysis of a variational inequality modeling perpetual executive stock options, Euro. J. Appl. Math., 26 (2015), 193-213), Qin et al. (2015, Regularity free boundary arising from optimal continuous exercise perpetual executive stock options, Interfaces and Free Boundaries, 17 (2015), 69-92), Song & Yu (2011, A parabolic variational inequality related to the perpetual American executive stock options, Nonlinear Analysis, 74 (2011), 6583-6600) for the case when the underlying stock's expected return rate is smaller than the discount rate. In this paper, we consider the remaining case: the discount rate is bigger than the growth rate but no bigger than the return rate. The existence of a unique classical solution as well as a continuous and strictly decreasing free boundary is proved.