Game-theoretic probability in continuous time


This project is part of the Game-Theoretic Probability and Finance project. Treatment of continuous time in Glenn Shafer's and my 2001 book and several subsequent papers was based on non-standard analysis. In their recent (August 2007) paper, Kei Takeuchi, Masayuki Kumon, and Akimichi Takemura suggested an approach avoiding non-standard analysis and introduced in game-theoretic probability the important technique of "high-frequency limit order strategies". (My old 1993 paper published in Test also suggested a game-theoretic approach to continuous-time processes without non-standard analysis, but it was awkward in some respects and so was not pursued further.) The following papers develop the Takeuchi-Kumon-Takemura approach:

  1. Continuous-time trading and emergence of randomness (December 2007, last revised January 2008).
    A new definition of events of game-theoretic probability zero in continuous time is proposed and used to prove results suggesting that trading in financial markets results in the emergence of properties usually associated with randomness. This paper concentrates on "qualitative" results, stated in terms of order (or order topology) rather than in terms of the precise values taken by the price processes (assumed continuous).
  2. Continuous-time trading and emergence of volatility (December 2007).
    This paper shows that the strong variation exponent of non-constant continuous price processes has to be 2, as in the case of Brownian motion.
  3. Game-theoretic Brownian motion (January 2008).
    This paper suggests a perfect-information game, along the lines of Lévy's characterization of Brownian motion, that formalizes the process of Brownian motion in game-theoretic probability.
  4. Continuous-time trading and the emergence of probability (April 2009).
    This paper establishes a non-stochastic analogue of the celebrated result by Dubins and Schwarz about reduction of continuous martingales to Brownian motion via time change. It contains the main results of papers 1 and 2 as special cases.

This page is maintained by Vladimir Vovk.   Last modified on 29 April 2009