Pricing and Calibration in Local Volatility Models Via Fast Quantization

In this paper we propose the first calibration exercise based on quantization methods. Pricing and calibration are typically difficult tasks to accomplish: pricing should be fast and accurate, otherwise calibration cannot be performed efficiently. We apply in a local volatility context the recursive marginal quantization methodology to the pricing of vanilla and barrier options. A successful calibration of the Quadratic Normal Volatility model is performed in order to show the potentiality of the method in a concrete example, while a numerical exercise on barrier options shows that quantization overcomes Monte-Carlo methods.