1. Introduction
In 1994, Pardoux and Peng [
1] put forward the following backward doubly stochastic differential equations (BDSDEs):
which can be applied to produce a probabilistic expression of certain quasilinear stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs). Because of its importance to SPDEs, the interest in BDSDEs has increased considerably (see [
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14,
15]). At the same time, the stochastic control problem of backward doubly stochastic systems has been studied extensively (see [
16,
17,
18,
19,
20,
21]).
In 2003, Peng and Shi [
22] introduced the following time-symmetric fully coupled forward–backward stochastic systems:
which are the so-called forward–backward doubly stochastic differential equations (FBDSDEs). The forward and backward equations in Equation (
2) are the BDSDE in Equation (
1) with stochastic integrals in different directions. Therefore, the FBDSDE in Equation (
2) is established to provide a more general framework of fully coupled forward–backward stochastic differential equations. Under some monotone assumptions, Peng and Shi [
22] obtained the unique solvability of FBDSDEs (
2). Zhu et al. [
23,
24] have extended the results in [
22] to different dimensions and the weaker monotonic assumptions, and gave the probabilistic interpretation for the solutions to SPDEs combined with algebra equations. Zhang and Shi [
25] and Shi and Zhu [
26] studied the stochastic control problem of FBDSDEs.
Game theory has penetrated into economic theory and attracted more and more research. It was first proposed by Von Neumann and Morgenstern [
27]. Nash [
28] has done groundbreaking work on non-cooperative games and presents the concept of a classic Nash equilibrium. Zhao et al. [
29] studied the optimal investment and reinsurance of insurers in default securities under a mean-variance criterion in the jump-diffusion risk model. Many papers on stochastic differential game problems driven by backward stochastic differential equations have been published (see [
30,
31,
32]). The differential game problem for forward–backward doubly stochastic differential equations was addressed in [
33]. However, the future evolution of a lot of processes depends not only on their current state, but also on their historical state, and these processes can usually be characterized by stochastic differential equations with time delay. The optimal control problem for stochastic differential equations with delay was discussed in [
34,
35,
36,
37,
38,
39]. The nonzero sum differential game of the stochastic differential delay equation was studied in [
40,
41]. Shen and Zeng [
42] researched the optimal investment and reinsurance with time delay for insurers under a mean-variance criterion.
The extra noise
in Equation (
1) can be regarded as some additional financial information that is not disclosed to the public in practice, such as in the derivative securities market, but is available to some investors. Arriojas et al. [
43] and Kazmerchuk et al. [
44] obtained the option pricing formula with time delay based on the stock price process with time delay. As far as we know, there is little discussion about differential games of doubly stochastic systems with delay. In this article, we will discuss this direction, that is, the following nonzero sum differential game driven by doubly stochastic systems with time delay. The control system is
where
is the state process pair,
is a constant time delay parameter, and
. We denote
and
,
, which are the cost functionals corresponding to the players 1 and 2:
Our task is to find
such that
To figure out the above nonzero sum differential game problem, it is natural to involve the adjoint equation, which is a kind of anticipated BDSDE (see [
45,
46]). It is therefore necessary to explore the following general FBDSDE with the forward equation being a delayed doubly SDE and the backward equation being the anticipated BDSDE:
where
.
Our work differs from the above in the following distinctions. First of all, we introduce a time-symmetric stochastic system, which generalizes the results in [
22] to a more general case: forward doubly stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with delay as forward equations and anticipated backward doubly stochastic differential equations as backward equations. Secondly, we investigate the problem of a nonzero sum differential game driven by doubly stochastic systems with time delay, which enriches the types of stochastic delayed differential game problems. Finally, we explore the linear quadratic (LQ) games for a doubly stochastic system with time delay, and use the solution of the above general FBDSDE to give an explicit expression of the unique equilibrium point.
The structure of this paper is as follows. We give the framework of the doubly stochastic games with delay and a preliminary view on the general FBDSDE in
Section 2. We set up a necessary condition for the open-loop Nash equilibrium of such games to form a Pontryagin maximum principle in
Section 3.
Section 4 is devoted to the verification theorem of a sufficient condition for Nash equilibrium. In order to visually demonstrate the above results, the nonzero sum differential game for LQ double stochastic delay systems is studied in
Section 5. By using the results of our FBDSDE, the explicit representation of Nash equilibrium points for LQ game problems is obtained. For the convenience of the reader, we present the skeleton of the proof on uniqueness and existence for the general FBDSDE in
Section 6. Finally, we conclude this article with a summary.
3. Necessary Maximum Principle
For convex admissible control sets, the classical method to obtain the necessary optimality condition is the convex perturbation method. Let
be an equilibrium point of Problem (A) and
be the corresponding optimal trajectory. Let
be such that
. Since
and
are convex, for any
,
is also in
. As illustrated before, we denote by
and
the corresponding state trajectories of the game system in Equation (
3) along with the controls
and
.
For convenience, we use the following notations throughout this paper:
where
means one of
.
We bring in the following variational equation:
By (H1) and Theorem 3.1.1 in [
20], it is easy to see that there is a unique adapted solution to Equation (
6).
For
,
, we set
We have the following:
Lemma 1. Let the hypotheses (
H1)
and (
H2)
be true. Then, for ,
Proof of Lemma 1 For
, we have
or
where we denote
Using Itô’s formula to
on
, through (H1), we get
Applying Grownwall’s inequalities, we can easily get the desired result. Again, we can prove that for . The proof is complete. □
Based on
being an equilibrium point of Problem (A), then
From Equations (
9) and (
10) and Lemma 1, we obtain the following variational inequality.
Lemma 2. Let assumptions(
H1)
and (
H2)
hold. Then Proof of Lemma 2 For
, from Equation (
7), we derive
Let
in Equation (
9), so, for
, Equation (
11) is established. Similarly, we can prove that the conclusion holds for
. The proof is complete. □
Let us define the Hamiltonian function
,
as follows:
We introduce the following adjoint equation
where
.
Remark 1. It is easy to see that the adjoint Equation (12) above is a linear anticipated BDSDE, then the unique solvability of Equation (12) can be guaranteed by theorem 3.2 in [45] and theorem 2.4 in [46]. Theorem 2 (Necessary maximum principle).
Suppose (
H1)
and (
H2)
hold, and ,
is an equilibrium point of Problem (A) and
is the corresponding state trajectory. Then we havehold for any , a.e., a.s., where is the solution of the adjoint Equation (12). Proof of Theorem 2 For
. Using Itô’s formula to
, we obtain
Combining the initial conditions and the termination conditions, we get
According to Lemma 2, we have
Because
satisfies
, we have
which means that
At present, take an arbitrary element
F of
-algebra
, and set
Obviously, is an admissible control.
We apply the inequality in Equation (
13) to
, and get
which contains that
The expression within the conditional expectation is -measurable, so the result follows. Following the above proof, we can prove that the other inequality is true for any . The proof is completed. □
5. Applications in LQ Doubly Stochastic Games with Delay
In this section, our maximal principle is used for the nonzero sum differential game problem of LQ doubly stochastic systems with delay. To simplify the notation, let us assume that
. The control system is
where
is the initial path of
.
are
bounded matrices,
and
,
are two admissible control processes, i.e.,
-measurable square-integrable processes taking values in
.
and
are
bounded matrices. We denote
and
, which are the cost functionals corresponding to the players 1 and 2:
where
are
non-negative symmetric bounded matrices, and
are
positive symmetric bounded matrices and the inverse
are also bounded. Our task is to find
such that
We need the following assumption:
Hypothesis 5 (H5).
where
, and
. Now, with the help of the above general FBDSDE, the explicit expression for the Nash equilibrium point of the above game problem can be obtained.
Theorem 4. The mappingis one Nash equilibrium point for the above game problems in Equations (16)–(18), where , is the solution of the following general FBDSDE: Similar to [
31,
48], the proof of Theorem 4 is easy to give, and we have therefore excluded it.
For sake of clarity, we give the following Problem (S), which is a special case of Problem (A). To simplify the notation, let us assume that
. The control system is
where
is the initial path of
.
and
,
are two admissible control processes, i.e.,
-measurable square-integrable processes taking values in
. We denote
and
, which are the cost functionals corresponding to the players 1 and 2:
Our task is to find
such that
Then the Hamiltonian functions are
where
is the solution of the following adjoint equations:
It is easy to see that the above equation is the anticipated BDSDE, which is solvable theorem 3.2 in [
45] and theorem 2.4 in [
46]. From the maximum principle, we get that
is one Nash equilibrium point for the above game in Equations (
16)–(
18).
6. The Proof of Theorem 1
Proof of Theorem 1 Since the initial path of in and the terminal conditions and trajectories of in are given in advance, we only need to consider .
Uniqueness Let
and
be two solutions of Equation (
3). We set
Applying Itô’s formula to
on
, we have
By virtue of (H3), it follows that
If
,
, then we have
and
. Thus
and
. In particular,
. Consequently, from the uniqueness result of the anticipated BDSDE (see [
45,
46]), it follows that
and
.
If
,
, then we have
and
. Thus
and
. From the uniqueness result of the delayed doubly SDE (see [
20]), it follows that
and
.
Similarly to the above arguments, the desired result can be obtained easily in the case . The uniqueness is proved. □
The proof of the existence is a combination of the above technique and a priori estimate technique introduced by Peng [
49]. We divide the proof of existence into three cases:
,
and
.
Case 1 If
, then
,
. We consider the following family of FBDSDEs parametrized by
where
and
and
are arbitrarily given vector-valued random variables. When
the existence of the solution of Equation (
21) implies clearly that of Equation (
5). Due to the existence and uniqueness of the delayed doubly SDE (see [
20]), when
, the Equation (
21) is uniquely solvable. The following a priori lemma is a key step in the proof of the method of continuation. It shows that for a fixed
if Equation (
21) is uniquely solvable, then it is also uniquely solvable for any
, for some positive constant
independent of
Lemma 3. We assume . Under assumptions(
H3)
, there exists a positive constant such that if a priori, for each , , Equation (
16)
is uniquely solvable for some , then for each , and , , Equation (16) is also uniquely solvable in , . Proof of Lemma 3 Since for
,
, there exists a unique solution to Equation (
16) for
. Thus for each
, there exists a unique quadruple
satisfying the following equations
where
is independent of
. We will prove that the mapping defined by
is contractive for a small enough
.
Let
and
.
Applying Itô’s formula to
on
it follows that
with some constant
. Hereafter,
C will be some generic constant, which can be different from line to line and depends only on the Lipschitz constants
k,
,
,
,
H and
T. It is obvious that
,
On the other hand, for the difference of the solutions
, we apply a standard method of estimation. Applying Itô’s formula to
on
, we have
Combining the estimates in Equations (
22) and (
23), for a sufficiently large constant
, we have
We now choose
. It is clear that, for each fixed
, the mapping
is contractive in the sense that
Thus this mapping has a unique fixed point
, which is the solution of Equation (
16) for
, as
. The proof is complete. □
Case 2 If
, then
. We consider the following equations
When
, the existence of the solution of Equation (
24) implies clearly that of Equation (
16). Due to the existence and uniqueness of the anticipated BDSDE (see [
45,
46]), when
, we know that Equation (
24) is uniquely solvable. By the same techniques, we can also prove the following lemma similar to Lemma 3.
Lemma 4. Assume . Under assumption(
H3)
, there exists a positive constant such that if a priori, for each , and , Equation (24) is uniquely solvable for some , then for each , and , , Equation (24) is also uniquely solvable in , . Case 3. From (H3), we only need to consider two cases as follows:
- (1)
If , , , we can have the same result as Lemma 3.
- (2)
If , , , the same result as Lemma 4 holds.
Now we give the proof of the existence of Theorem 1.
Proof of the Existence of Theorem 1. For the first case where
, we know that for each
, and
, Equation (
21) has a unique solution as
. It follows from Lemma 3 that there exists a positive constant
,
such that for any
and
, and
, Equation (
21) has a unique solution for
. Since
depends only on
, we can repeat this process for
N times with
. In particular, for
with
, and
,
, Equation (
21) has a unique solution in
.
In the case where and , our desired result can be obtained similarly. The proof of the existence of Theorem 1 is complete. □
Remark 2. In the proof of the Existence of Theorem 1, (i) and (ii) in (H3) can be replaced by
- (i)’
- (ii)’
where , and are given non-negative constants with and . Moreover we have , (resp., ) when (resp., ).
7. Conclusions
The future evolution of a lot of processes depends not only on their current state, but also on their historical state, and these processes can usually be characterized by stochastic differential equations with time delay. In this article, we have discussed a class of differential games driven by doubly stochastic systems with time delay. To deal with the above nonzero sum differential game problem, it is natural to involve the adjoint equation, which is a kind of anticipated BDSDE. It is therefore necessary to explore a kind of general FBDSDE with the forward equation being a delayed doubly SDE and the backward equation being an anticipated BDSDE, which are so-called time-symmetry stochastic systems. This kind of FBDSDE covers a lot of the previous results, which promotes the results in [
35] to doubly stochastic integrals, and extends the results in [
23] to the case that involves the time delay and anticipation. We have adopted the convex variational method, and established a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for the equilibrium point of the game. In the LQ game problem, the state equation and the adjoint equation are completely coupled, then a class of linear FBDSDE is constructed, in which the forward equation is an anticipated forward doubly SDE and the backward equation is a delayed backward doubly SDE. By means of the unique solvability of the FBDSDE, the explicit expression for the Nash equilibrium point of the LQ game is obtained. Many financial and economic phenomena can be modeled by the LQ model, and we expect that the LQ game driven by doubly stochastic systems with time delay can be widely applied in these fields.
Notwithstanding that we are committed to the above game problem, we are also able to progress some consequences of optimal control for BDSDEs with time delay, for example Xu and Han [
19,
20].