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Motivated by the pricing of American options for baskets weconsider a parabolic variational inequality in a boundedpolyhedral domain $\Omega\subset\mathbb{R}^d$ 
with a continuous piecewisesmooth obstacle. We formulate a fully discrete method by usingpiecewise linear finite elements in space and the backward Eulermethod in time. We define an a posteriori error estimator and showthat it gives an upper bound for the error inL2(0,T;H1 (Ω)). The error estimator is localized in thesense that the size of the elliptic residual is only relevant inthe approximate non-contact region, and the approximability of theobstacle is only relevant in the approximate contact region. Wealso obtain lower bound results for the space error indicators inthe non-contact region, and for the time error estimator.Numerical results for d=1,2 show that the error estimator decayswith the same rate as the actual error when the space meshsize hand the time step τ tend to zero. Also, the error indicatorscapture the correct behavior of the errors in both the contact andthe non-contact regions.
