Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2016 iii Paper 201 2 d Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
If , either , or both stopping times exceed . Therefore the maximal bound for a nonnegative martingale and the Markov inequality give, for ,The right-hand side is minimized at . Whenever the claimed bound is nontrivial, , this choice has and is allowed under the corrected overshoot hypothesis. Substituting gives the square-root tail bound for martingale absorption:When the displayed upper bound is at least one, the inequality follows from . This handles every without using the impossible small-threshold hypothesis.