Stochastic control/stopping problem with expectation constraints

Abstract

We study a stochastic control/stopping problem with a series of inequality-type and equality-type expectation constraints in a general non-Markovian framework. We demonstrate that the stochastic control/stopping problem with expectation constraints (CSEC) is independent of a specific probability setting and is equivalent to the constrained stochastic control/stopping problem in weak formulation (an optimization over joint laws of Brownian motion, state dynamics, diffusion controls and stopping rules on an enlarged canonical space). Using a martingale-problem formulation of controlled SDEs in spirit of Stroock and Varadhan (2006), we characterize the probability classes in weak formulation by countably many actions of canonical processes, and thus obtain the upper semi-analyticity of the CSEC value function. Then we employ a measurable selection argument to establish a dynamic programming principle (DPP) in weak formulation for the CSEC value function, in which the conditional expected costs act as additional states for constraint levels at the intermediate horizon.

This article extends (El Karoui and Tan, 2013) to the expectation-constraint case. We extend our previous work (Bayraktar and Yao, 2024) to the more complicated setting where the diffusion is controlled. Compared to that paper the topological properties of diffusion-control spaces and the corresponding measurability are more technically involved which complicate the arguments especially for the measurable selection for the super-solution side of DPP in the weak formulation.