Finite-jump boundary crossing identity 2026-10-14
For the uniform-arrival residual mass martingale with total weight , the first crossing of level one happens continuously: its only jumps are downward, and an arrival almost surely misses the finitely many deterministic possible crossing times. Stop at that crossing or at . The stopped values lie between zero and one, and their limit as is the crossing indicator. Optional stopping and dominated convergence identify its probability as . At the strict boundary inequality already fails at time zero.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2007 iii Paper 33 2 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Write the residual process asFor , the filtration tells us whether each has arrived by time , and its exact arrival time if it has. On , its conditional law is uniform on . Independence of the original means that the histories of the other arrivals do not alter this law. HenceThis conditional identity can also be checked against products of bounded functions of the censored arrival times and extended to by the Monotone class theorem. Summing the identity gives .
Each is adapted and integrable, withIts paths are smooth between the finitely many arrival times and have downward jumps of size at arrivals before time one. The indicators use , so the value at a jump is the post-jump value: paths are right continuous with finite left limits on . Thus is a càdlàg martingale, specifically the uniform-arrival residual mass martingale.