Optimal market making under partial information and numerical methods for impulse control games with applications

TL;DR

This thesis develops methods for optimal market making under partial information using stochastic filtering and control, and introduces numerical algorithms for solving complex impulse control games with applications to finance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining stochastic filtering with impulse control for market making and proposes new numerical algorithms for solving nonzero-sum impulse control games.

Findings

Optimal spreads are biased under regime uncertainty.

The proposed policy-iteration solver effectively solves impulse control games.

High-precision equilibrium payoffs and Nash equilibria are computed for complex problems.

Abstract

The topics treated in this thesis are inherently two-fold. The first part considers the problem of a market maker optimally setting bid/ask quotes over a finite time horizon, to maximize her expected utility. The intensities of the orders she receives depend not only on the spreads she quotes, but also on unobservable factors modelled by a hidden Markov chain. This stochastic control problem under partial information is solved by means of stochastic filtering, control and PDMPs theory. The value function is characterized as the unique continuous viscosity solution of its dynamic programming equation and numerically compared with its full information counterpart. The optimal full information spreads are shown to be biased when the exact market regime is unknown, as the market maker needs to adjust for additional regime uncertainty in terms of PnL sensitivity and observable order flow volatility. The second part deals with numerically solving nonzero-sum stochastic impulse control games. These offer a realistic and far-reaching modelling framework, but the difficulty in solving such problems has hindered their proliferation. A policy-iteration-type solver is proposed to solve an underlying system of quasi-variational inequalities, and it is validated numerically with reassuring results. Eventually, the focus is put on games with a symmetric structure and an improved algorithm is put forward. A rigorous convergence analysis is undertaken with natural assumptions on the players strategies, which admit graph-theoretic interpretations in the context of weakly chained diagonally dominant matrices. The algorithm is used to compute with high precision equilibrium payoffs and Nash equilibria of otherwise too challenging problems, and even some for which results go beyond the scope of the currently available theory.