It is well known that martingale transport plans between marginals $μ\neqν$ are never given by Monge maps -- with the understanding that the map is over the first marginal $μ$, or forward in time. Here, we change the perspective, with surprising results. We show that any distributions $μ,ν$ in convex order with $ν$ atomless admit a martingale coupling given by a Monge map over the second marginal $ν$. Namely, we construct a particular coupling called the barcode transport. Much more generally, we prove that such ``backward Monge'' martingale transports are dense in the set of all martingale couplings, paralleling the classical denseness result for Monge transports in the Kantorovich formulation of optimal transport. Various properties and applications are presented, including a refined version of Strassen's theorem and a mimicking theorem where the marginals of a given martingale are reproduced by a ``backward deterministic'' martingale, a remarkable type of process whose current state encodes its whole history.
It is known that the Azema-Yor solution to the Skorokhod embedding problem maximizes the law of the running maximum of an uniformly integrable martingale with given terminal value distribution. Recently this optimality property has been generalized to expectations of certain bivariate cost functions depending on the terminal value and the running maximum. In this paper we give an extension of this result to another class of functions. In particular, we study a class of cost functions with the property that the corresponding optimal embeddings are not Azema-Yor. The suggested approach is quite …
Let $\{d_k\}_{k \geq 0}$ be a complex martingale difference in $L^p[0,1],$ where $1<p<\infty,$ and $\{\e_k\}_{k \geq 0}$ a sequence in $\{\pm 1\}.$ We obtain the following generalization of Burkholder's famous result. If $τ\in [-\frac 12, \frac 12]$ and $n \in \Z_+$ then $$|\sum_{k=0}^n{(\{c} \e_k τ) d_k}|_{L^p([0,1], \C^2)} \leq ((p^*-1)^2 + τ^2)^{\frac 12}|\sum_{k=0}^n{d_k}|_{L^p([0,1], \C)},$$ where $((p^*-1)^2 + τ^2)^{\frac 12}$ is sharp and $p^*-1 = \max\{p-1, \frac 1{p-1}\}.$ For $2\leq p<\infty$ the result is also true with sharp constant for $τ\in \R.$
The duality between the robust (or equivalently, model independent) hedging of path dependent European options and a martingale optimal transport problem is proved. The financial market is modeled through a risky asset whose price is only assumed to be a continuous function of time. The hedging problem is to construct a minimal super-hedging portfolio that consists of dynamically trading the underlying risky asset and a static position of vanilla options which can be exercised at the given, fixed maturity. The dual is a Monge-Kantorovich type martingale transport problem of maximizing the expe…
In this paper, Monge-Kantorovich problem is considered in the infinite dimension on an abstract Wiener space $(W, H,μ)$, where $H$ is Cameron-Martin space and $μ$ is the Gaussian measure. We study the regularity of optimal transport maps with a quadratic cost function assuming that both initial and target measures have a strictly positive Radon-Nikodym density with respect to $μ$. Under conditions on the density functions, the forward and backward transport maps can be written in terms of Sobolev derivative of so-called Monge-Brenier maps, or Monge potentials. We show Sobolev regularity of the…
We will study variations in Sobolev spaces of optimal transport maps with the standard Gaussian measure as the reference measure. Some dimension free inequalities will be obtained. As application, we construct solutions to Monge-Ampere equations in finite dimension, as well as on the Wiener space.
We provide counterexamples to regularity of optimal maps in the classical Monge problem under various assumptions on the initial data. Our construction is based on a variant of the counterexample in \cite{LSW} to Lipschitz regularity of the monotone optimal map between smooth densities supported on convex domains.
We investigate existence of dual optimizers in one-dimensional martingale optimal transport problems. While [BNT16] established such existence for weak (quasi-sure) duality, [BHP13] showed existence for the natural stronger pointwise duality may fail even in regular cases. We establish that (pointwise) dual maximizers exist when $y\mapsto c(x,y)$ is convex, or equivalent to a convex function. It follows that when marginals are compactly supported, the existence holds when the cost $c(x,y)$ is twice continuously differentiable in $y$. Further, this may not be improved as we give examples with $…
The purpose of the present work is twofold. First, we develop the theory of general self-similar growth-fragmentation processes by focusing on martingales which appear naturally in this setting and by recasting classical results for branching random walks in this framework. In particular, we establish many-to-one formulas for growth-fragmentations and define the notion of intrinsic area of a growth-fragmentation. Second, we identify a distinguished family of growth-fragmentations closely related to stable Lévy processes, which are then shown to arise as the scaling limit of the perimeter proce…
We give a new probabilistic construction of solutions to real Monge-Ampère equations in R^n satisfying the second boundary value problem with respect to a given target convex body P) which fits naturally into the theory of optimal transport. More precisely, certain beta-deformed permanental (bosonic) N-particle point processes are introduced and their empirical measures are, in the large N-limit, shown to converge exponentially in probability to a deterministic measure whose potential satisfies the real Monge-Ampère equation in question. In particular, this allows us to represent the solution …
Continuity of the value of the martingale optimal transport problem on the real line w.r.t. its marginals was recently established in Backhoff-Veraguas and Pammer [2] and Wiesel [21]. We present a new perspective of this result using the theory of set-valued maps. In particular, using results from Beiglböck, Jourdain, Margheriti, and Pammer [5], we show that the set of martingale measures with fixed marginals is continuous, i.e., lower- and upper hemicontinuous, w.r.t. its marginals. Moreover, we establish compactness of the set of optimizers as well as upper hemicontinuity of the optimizers w…
Two probability distributions $μ$ and $ν$ in second stochastic order can be coupled by a supermartingale, and in fact by many. Is there a canonical choice? We construct and investigate two couplings which arise as optimizers for constrained Monge-Kantorovich optimal transport problems where only supermartingales are allowed as transports. Much like the Hoeffding-Fréchet coupling of classical transport and its symmetric counterpart, the antitone coupling, these can be characterized by order-theoretic minimality properties, as simultaneous optimal transports for certain classes of reward (or cos…
Given a process with independent increments $X$ (not necessarily a martingale) and a large class of square integrable r.v. $H=f(X_T)$, $f$ being the Fourier transform of a finite measure $μ$, we provide explicit Kunita-Watanabe and Föllmer-Schweizer decompositions. The representation is expressed by means of two significant maps: the expectation and derivative operators related to the characteristics of $X$. We also provide an explicit expression for the variance optimal error when hedging the claim $H$ with underlying process $X$. Those questions are motivated by finding the solution of the c…
