Conditional distributions, exchangeable particle systems, and stochastic partial differential equations

Abstract

Stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) whose solutions are probability-measure-valued processes are considered. Measure-valued processes of this type arise naturally as de Finetti measures of infinite exchangeable systems of particles and as the solutions for filtering problems. In particular, we consider a model of asset price determination by an infinite collection of competing traders. Each trader's valuations of the assets are given by the solution of a stochastic differential equation, and the infinite system of SDEs, assumed to be exchangeable, is coupled through a common noise process and through the asset prices. In the simplest, single asset setting, the market clearing price at any time t is given by a quantile of the de Finetti measure determined by the individual trader valuations. In the multi-asset setting, the prices are essentially given by the solution of an assignment game introduced by Shapley and Shubik. Existence of solutions for the infinite exchangeable system is obtained by an approximation argument that requires the continuous dependence of the prices on the determining de Finetti measures which is ensured if the de Finetti measures charge every open set. The solution of the SPDE satisfied by the de Finetti measures can be interpreted as the conditional distribution of the solution of a single stochastic differential equation given the common noise and the price process. Under mild nondegeneracy conditions on the coefficients of the stochastic differential equation, the conditional distribution is shown to charge every open set, and under slightly stronger conditions, it is shown to be absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure with strictly positive density. The conditional distribution results are the main technical contribution and can also be used to study the properties of the solution of the nonlinear filtering equation within a framework that allows for the signal noise and the observation noise to be correlated. © Association des Publications de l'Institut Henri Poincaré, 2014.