The previous post introduced the concept of the compensator of a process, which is known to exist for all locally integrable semimartingales. In this post, I’ll just look at the very special case of compensators of processes consisting of a single jump of unit size.
Definition 1 Let
be a stopping time. The compensator of
is defined to be the compensator of
.
So, the compensator A of is the unique predictable FV process such that
and
is a local martingale. Compensators of stopping times are sufficiently special that we can give an accurate description of how they behave. For example, if
is predictable, then its compensator is just
. If, on the other hand,
is totally inaccessible and almost surely finite then, as we will see below, its compensator, A, continuously increases to a value
which has the exponential distribution.
However, compensators of stopping times are sufficiently general to be able to describe the compensator of any cadlag adapted process X with locally integrable variation. We can break X down into a continuous part plus a sum over its jumps,
| (1) |
Here, are disjoint stopping times such that the union
of their graphs contains all the jump times of X. That they are disjoint just means that
whenever
, for any
. As was shown in an earlier post, not only is such a sequence
of the stopping times guaranteed to exist, but each of the times can be chosen to be either predictable or totally inaccessible. As the first term,
, on the right hand side of (1) is a continuous FV process, it is by definition equal to its own compensator. So, the compensator of X is equal to
plus the sum of the compensators of
. The reduces compensators of locally integrable FV processes to those of processes consisting of a single jump at either a predictable or a totally inaccessible time. Continue reading “Compensators of Stopping Times”