A Longstaff and Schwartz Approach to the Early Election Problem.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Decision Sciences Volume 2012, Article ID 287579, 18 pages doi:10.1155/2012/287579 Research Article A Longstaff and Schwartz Approach to the Early Election Problem Elliot Tonkes1 and Dharma Lesmono2 1 Energy Edge Pty Ltd., 141 Queen Street, Brisbane, Queensland 4000, Australia 2 Department of Mathematics, Universitas Katolik Parahyangan, Jalan Ciumbuleuit 94, Bandung 40141, Indonesia Correspondence should be addressed to Elliot Tonkes, etonkes@.au Received 26 April 2012; Accepted 13 September 2012 Academic Editor: David Bulger Copyright q 2012 E. Tonkes and D. Lesmono. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In many democratic parliamentary systems, election timing is an important decision availed to governments according to sovereign political systems. Prudent governments can take advantage of this constitutional option in order to maximize their expected remaining life in power. The problem of establishing the optimal time to call an election based on observed poll data has been well studied with several solution methods and various degrees of modeling complexity. The derivation of the optimal exercise boundary holds strong similarities with the American option valuation problem from mathematical finance. A seminal technique refined by Longstaff and Schwartz in 2001 provided a method to estimate the exercise boundary of the American options using a Monte Carlo method and a least squares objective. In this paper, we modify the basic technique to establi