A Note on Some Martingale Inequalities

TL;DR

This paper derives sharper martingale inequalities for both discrete and continuous cases, generalizing classical results and providing more precise bounds useful in stochastic analysis and numerics.

Contribution

It introduces improved martingale inequalities with smaller constants, extending known results to multi-dimensional settings and offering elementary proofs for the discrete case.

Findings

Inequalities are sharp for discrete martingales in L^p.

Generalized inequalities for continuous martingales via Itô integrals.

Constants in inequalities are smaller than classical Burkholder bounds.

Abstract

We derive inequalities for time-discrete and time-continuous martingales that are similar to the well-known Burkholder inequalities. For the time-discrete case arbitrary martingales in $L^p(\Omega)$ are treated, whereas in the time-continuous case martingales defined by It\^o integrals w.r.t. a multi-dimensional Wiener process are considered. The estimates for the time-discrete martingales are related to the more general results by I. Pinelis (1994) and are proved to be sharp by a different and more elementary proof for this special setting. Further, for time-continuous martingales the presented inequalities are generalizations of similar estimates proved by M. Zakai (1967) and E. Rio (2009) to the general multi-dimensional case. Especially, these inequalities possess smaller constants compared to the ones that result if the original Burkholder inequalities would be applied for such estimates. Therefore, the presented inequalities are highly valuable in, e.g., stochastic analysis and stochastic numerics.