Let be Brownian motion in started at a nonzero point. The function is a positive harmonic function on because its Laplacian vanishes there. Stopping on annuli and applying Itô formula shows that is a local martingale. Letting the inner boundary shrink to zero also shows that three-dimensional Brownian motion does not hit the origin.
A positive local martingale is a supermartingale, so is -bounded by . The upcrossing proof from part (c), which applies verbatim to a positive supermartingale, therefore gives a finite almost-sure limit
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For , Itô formula shows that
is a martingale. Take expectations and let . The function is bounded on the compact set , while is bounded and by part (a). The dominated convergence theorem therefore gives Dynkin formula for Brownian motion
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Apply Itô formula to . Its semimartingale decomposition is
The second term is a continuous finite-variation process. Since is assumed to be a local martingale, uniqueness of the semimartingale decomposition makes this term identically zero. Both and are nonzero, so the quadratic variation of is .
The Lévy characterization of Brownian motion now says that is a Brownian motion. Consequently
is a constant multiple of an exponential Brownian martingale. It is therefore a true martingale for every .
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Use first the test function . The assumed martingale problem says that
is a continuous local martingale. Next use to see that
is a local martingale. On the other hand, Itô formula applied to shows that
is a local martingale. Their difference is both a continuous local martingale and a finite-variation process, so
Part (b), with , supplies a Brownian motion such that
Therefore
so is a weak solution of a stochastic differential equation to the stated equation.
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Put
Then uniformly, , and . Itô formula gives
The bounded predictable integrands converge pointwise to , with . Part (c) therefore makes the stochastic integrals converge u.c.p. The left-hand side converges u.c.p. to , so the increasing continuous processes
also converge u.c.p. Their limit has a continuous increasing version: extract almost-sure locally uniform convergence from each compact interval and use a diagonal argument. We obtain
the Tanaka formula with . It expresses as a continuous local martingale plus a continuous finite-variation process, so is a continuous semimartingale.
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In the Black-Scholes model,
Conditioning on and using the moment-generating function of the independent Gaussian increment gives
The function satisfies the zero-rate Black-Scholes equation, so Itô formula leaves only its stochastic term:
Consequently the required delta hedge is
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