Black and Scholes initially rejected Merton’s continuous-trading assumption.

Evidence

Black and Scholes were not initially convinced of the correctness of Merton’s approach. Merton’s additional assumption his world of continuoustime trading was a radical abstraction, and in a January 1971 draft of their paper on option pricing Black and Scholes even claimed that aspects of the world posited by Merton were incompatible with equilibrium in capital markets (Black and Scholes 1971, pp. 20-21). Despite this disagreement, Black and Scholes used what was essentially Merton’s revised form of their arbitragebased derivation in the final, published version of their paper (Black and Scholes 1973), though they also presented Black’s original derivation, which drew directly on the Capital Asset Pricing Model. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 601

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the founding papers of modern finance were internally contested, an origin dispute relevant to how the models’ authority was later established. — connects to: Black and Scholes succeeded where Samuelson hesitated by accepting instantaneous rebalancing — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 612

Broader Connections

• Black and Scholes succeeded where Samuelson hesitated by accepting instantaneous rebalancing #responds-to (0.85) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 612