and efficient numerical procedure for valuing option-
s for which premature exercise may be optimal. Al-
so in [22], the paper empirically provided an alterna-
tive pption pricing models by first deriving an option
model that allows volatility, interest rates and jumps
to be stochastic. Further, [23] provided an analytical
treatment of a class of transforms, including various
Laplace and Fourier transforms as special cases, that
allow an analytical treatment of a range of valuation
and econometric problems to solve example applica-
tions including fixed-income pricing models, with a
role for intensity-based models of default, as well as
a wide range of option-pricing applications. It is well
known that the volatility and yield are set as constants
in the Geometric Brownian motion. Economists often
used this Geometric Brownian motion to describe the
stock trend, so it is very meaningful to study it. In
addition, this has attracted the attention and discus-
sion of a large number of scholars. Among them, it is
an important aspect to analyze asset pricing with the
change of financial time series. [24] considered the
research of multivariate GARCH model in explaining
the difference in expected returns between Shanghai
and Shenzhen of China's stock market. In addition,
the difference is not remarkable. Therefore, this pa-
per mainly focuses on the option price under the Geo-
metric Brownian motion process. However, because
the classical assumption is too idealistic, it has obvi-
ous limitations, that is, the volatility and yield in the
actual market do not meet the constant assumption.
For example, Figure 1 & Figure 2 show the trend of
the Dow Jones Industrial Index and the United States
Federal Fund Interest Rate (1955-2023). It is obvious
Fig.1: Dow Jones Industrial Index from 2018-
2023
that the volatility and yield are not constant, and they
will change under various influences. If we consider
the case of random volatility, in most cases, we can-
not give a closed-form solution and must define the
appropriate distribution for the volatility. For exam-
ple, [25] considering the pricing of derivative options
with random volatility, only provided the pricing for-
mula, and did not give a closed-form solution. Hence,
this paper take the broken drift and singular volatility
into consideration.
The first hitting time is a mathematical term that
Fig. 2: The United States Federal Fund Interest
Rate from 1955-2023
represents the moment when a stochastic process first
reaches a certain set of states. In terms of application,
the first hitting time has important practical signifi-
cance, for example, in fields like financial risk man-
agement, communication network optimization, and
transportation scheduling. In addition, the first hitting
time can also be used for the optimization of predic-
tion models and algorithms, for example in fields like
machine learning and data mining. By understand-
ing the nature and calculation methods of the hitting
time, we can better understand and optimize the be-
havior of stochastic processes, thereby providing bet-
ter solutions for practical applications. On one hand,
the first hitting time problem is very crucial as a clas-
sic subject. On the other hand, the study of the first
hitting time problem of Geometric Brownian motion
with broken drift and singular volatility is very few at
present. We also view this problem as our target s-
tudy. Around the literature about the first hitting time
problems, the authors may consult [26] under skew
CIR process, [27] under regime switching Geometric
Brownian motion, [28] under sticky skew Brownian
motion, and [29] under sticky skew CIR process. A
most recent paper in 2019, [30] considered the opti-
mal stopping and first hitting time problems of Brow-
nian motion with broken drift. However, there ex-
ists few papers concerning on hitting time and op-
tion pricing problems by introducing singularity coef-
ficients. In addition, traditional methods when solv-
ing the pricing problem needs complex calculations
or numerical scheme. Complex calculations may re-
sult in inaccurate or even non-closed-form solution-
s. Numerical computations have high requirements
for accuracy and real-time performance of the results.
Therefore, this paper tries to solve the first hitting time
and option pricing problem under our setting mod-
el, respectively. In probability scheme, we only need
to employee the variable substitution and probability
distribution of random variable function for our tar-
get under risk-neutral measure. Now let us introduce
the Geometric Brownian motion with broken drift and
WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on MATHEMATICS
DOI: 10.37394/23206.2023.22.95
Haoyan Zhang, Yece Zhou, Xuan Li, Yinyin Wu