Optimal Stochastic Control with Recursive Cost Functionals of Stochastic Differential Systems Reflected in a Domain

In this paper we study the optimal stochastic control problem for stochastic differential systems reflected in a domain. The cost functional is a recursive one, which is defined via generalized backward stochastic differential equations developed by Pardoux and Zhang [20]. The value function is shown to be the unique viscosity solution to the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, which is a fully nonlinear parabolic partial differential equation with a nonlinear Neumann boundary condition. For this, we also prove some new estimates for stochastic differential systems reflected in a domain.

Mean-field backward stochastic differential equations: A limit approach

Mathematical mean-field approaches play an important role in different fields of Physics and Chemistry, but have found in recent works also their application in Economics, Finance and Game Theory. The objective of our paper is to investigate a special mean-field problem in a purely stochastic approach: for the solution $(Y,Z)$ of a mean-field backward stochastic differential equation driven by a forward stochastic differential of McKean--Vlasov type with solution $X$ we study a special approximation by the solution $(X^N,Y^N,Z^N)$ of some decoupled forward--backward equation which coefficients are governed by $N$ independent copies of $(X^N,Y^N,Z^N)$. We show that the convergence speed of this approximation is of order $1/sqrt{N}$. Moreover, our special choice of the approximation allows to characterize the limit behavior of $sqrt{N}(X^N-X,Y^N-Y,Z^N-Z)$. We prove that this triplet converges in law to the solution of some forward--backward stochastic differential equation of mean-field type, which is not only governed by a Brownian motion but also by an independent Gaussian field.

Mean-Field Backward Stochastic Differential Equations and Related Partial Differential Equations

In [5] the authors obtained Mean-Field backward stochastic differential equations (BSDE) associated with a Mean-field stochastic differential equation (SDE) in a natural way as limit of some highly dimensional system of forward and backward SDEs, corresponding to a large number of ``particles (or ``agents). The objective of the present paper is to deepen the investigation of such Mean-Field BSDEs by studying them in a more general framework, with general driver, and to discuss comparison results for them. In a second step we are interested in partial differential equations (PDE) whose solutions can be stochastically interpreted in terms of Mean-Field BSDEs. For this we study a Mean-Field BSDE in a Markovian framework, associated with a Mean-Field forward equation. By combining classical BSDE methods, in particular that of ``backward semigroups introduced by Peng [14], with specific arguments for Mean-Field BSDEs we prove that this Mean-Field BSDE describes the viscosity solution of a nonlocal PDE. The uniqueness of this viscosity solution is obtained for the space of continuous functions with polynomial growth. With the help of an example it is shown that for the nonlocal PDEs associated to Mean-Field BSDEs one cannot expect to have uniqueness in a larger space of continuous functions.