Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2003/iii/paper-33/5/a/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2003 iii Paper 33 5 a Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
The PDF defines multiplication by an indicator: . PutThen almost surely, , and is a stopping time. It has exponential distribution of rate one and is independent of . The path stays at zero until , jumps to at , and remains there.
Let and . We verify the martingale property directly. On both increments and vanish. On , every observation up to is zero, so the past reveals only that survival event. Conditional on it, is rate-one exponential by memorylessness and remains independent of the mark . With ,whileSubtracting times the second identity from the first gives zero. The process is adapted and integrable, since its absolute value is bounded by on a finite horizon. ThereforeOn we have , so this is exactly the requested process. This first-principles argument uses the natural filtration, which does not disclose the future mark or lifetime. It describes a single marked exponential jump process.
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