One dimensional martingale rearrangement couplings

TL;DR

This paper presents a direct construction method for martingale rearrangement couplings under certain assumptions, advancing the understanding of their stability and providing a new approach compared to previous methods.

Contribution

It introduces a general construction of martingale rearrangement couplings under the barycentre dispersion assumption, avoiding complex limiting procedures used previously.

Findings

Provides a direct construction method for martingale rearrangements.

Shows stability of the inverse transform martingale coupling in adapted Wasserstein distance.

Extends the class of couplings close to Hoeffding-Fréchet coupling.

Abstract

We are interested in martingale rearrangement couplings. As introduced by Wiesel [37] in order to prove the stability of Martingale Optimal Transport problems, these are projections in adapted Wasserstein distance of couplings between two probability measures on the real line in the convex order onto the set of martingale couplings between these two marginals. In reason of the lack of relative compactness of the set of couplings with given marginals for the adapted Wasserstein topology, the existence of such a projection is not clear at all. Under a barycentre dispersion assumption on the original coupling which is in particular satisfied by the Hoeffding-Fr\'echet or comonotone coupling, Wiesel gives a clear algorithmic construction of a martingale rearrangement when the marginals are finitely supported and then gets rid of the finite support assumption by relying on a rather messy limiting procedure to overcome the lack of relative compactness. Here, we give a direct general construction of a martingale rearrangement coupling under the barycentre dispersion assumption. This martingale rearrangement is obtained from the original coupling by an approach similar to the construction we gave in [24] of the inverse transform martingale coupling, a member of a family of martingale couplings close to the Hoeffding-Fr\'echet coupling, but for a slightly different injection in the set of extended couplings introduced by Beiglb\"ock and Juillet [9] and which involve the uniform distribution on [0, 1] in addition to the two marginals. We last discuss the stability in adapted Wassertein distance of the inverse transform martingale coupling with respect to the marginal distributions.