One dimensional martingale rearrangement couplings

Abstract

We are interested in martingale rearrangement couplings. As introduced by Wiesel in order to prove the stability of Martingale Optimal Transport problems, these are projections in adapted Wasserstein distance of couplings between two probability measures on the real line in the convex order onto the set of martingale couplings between these two marginals. Under a barycentre dispersion assumption on the original coupling which is in particular satisfied by the Hoeffding-Fréchet or comonotone coupling, Wiesel gives a clear algorithmic construction of a martingale rearrangement when the marginals are finitely supported and then gets rid of the finite support assumption by relying on a rather messy limiting procedure to overcome the lack of relative compactness. Here, we give a direct general construction of a martingale rearrangement coupling under the barycentre dispersion assumption. This martingale rearrangement is obtained from the original coupling by an approach similar to the construction we gave in [25] of the inverse transform martingale coupling, a member of a family of martingale couplings close to the Hoeffding-Fréchet coupling, but for a slightly different injection in the set of extended couplings introduced by Beiglböck and Juillet and which involve the uniform distribution on [0,1] in addition to the two marginals.