Dividend ratcheting and capital injection under the Cram\'er-Lundberg model: Strong solution and optimal strategy

TL;DR

This paper solves a complex stochastic control problem involving dividend ratcheting and capital injection for an insurance company's surplus modeled by Cramér-Lundberg dynamics, providing explicit optimal strategies.

Contribution

It develops a novel probabilistic and PDE approach to establish the existence and uniqueness of a strong solution for the control problem, enabling explicit optimal policy characterization.

Findings

Established a unique strong solution to the HJB equation.

Characterized the optimal dividend policy via a switching free boundary.

Constructed an explicit optimal feedback control strategy.

Abstract

We consider an optimal dividend payout problem for an insurance company whose surplus follows the classical Cram\'er-Lundberg model. The dividend rate is subject to a ratcheting constraint (i.e., it must be nondecreasing over time), and the company may inject capital at a proportional cost to avoid ruin. This problem gives rise to a stochastic control problem with a self-path-dependent control constraint, costly capital injections, and jump-diffusion dynamics. The associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation is a partial integro-differential variational inequality featuring both a nonlocal integral term and a gradient constraint. We develop a systematic probabilistic and PDE-based approach to solve this HJB equation. By discretizing the space of admissible dividend rates, we construct a sequence of approximating regime-switching systems of ordinary integro-differential equations. Through careful a priori estimates and a limiting argument, we prove the existence and uniqueness of a \emph{strong solution} in a suitable space. This regularity result is fundamental: it allows us to characterize the optimal dividend policy via a switching free boundary and to construct an explicit optimal feedback control strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first complete solution -- comprising both the value function and an implementable optimal strategy -- for a dividend ratcheting problem with capital injection under the Cram\'er-Lundberg model. Our work advances the mathematical theory of optimal stochastic control beyond the standard viscosity solution framework, providing a rigorous foundation for dividend policy design in economics.