Two-sided reflected Markov-modulated Brownian motion with applications to fluid queues and dividend payouts

In this paper we study a reflected Markov-modulated Brownian motion with a two sided reflection in which the drift, diffusion coefficient and the two boundaries are (jointly) modulated by a finite state space irreducible continuous time Markov chain. The goal is to compute the stationary distribution of this Markov process, which in addition to the complication of having a stochastic boundary can also include jumps at state change epochs of the underlying Markov chain because of the boundary changes. We give the general theory and then specialize to the case where the underlying Markov chain has two states. Moreover, motivated by an application of optimal dividend strategies, we consider the case where the lower barrier is zero and the upper barrier is subject to control. In this case we generalized earlier results from the case of a reflected Brownian motion to the Markov modulated case.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figur

A new formula for some linear stochastic equations with applications

We give a representation of the solution for a stochastic linear equation of the form $X_t=Y_t+\int_{(0,t]}X_{s-} \mathrm {d}{Z}_s$ where $Z$ is a c\'adl\'ag semimartingale and $Y$ is a c\'adl\'ag adapted process with bounded variation on finite intervals. As an application we study the case where $Y$ and $-Z$ are nondecreasing, jointly have stationary increments and the jumps of $-Z$ are bounded by 1. Special cases of this process are shot-noise processes, growth collapse (additive increase, multiplicative decrease) processes and clearing processes. When $Y$ and $Z$ are, in addition, independent L\'evy processes, the resulting $X$ is called a generalized Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AAP637 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Useful martingales for stochastic storage processes with L\'{e}vy-type input

In this paper we generalize the martingale of Kella and Whitt to the setting of L\'{e}vy-type processes and show that the (local) martingales obtained are in fact square integrable martingales which upon dividing by the time index converge to zero a.s. and in $L^2$. The reflected L\'{e}vy-type process is considered as an example.Comment: 15 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1112.475

On the area between a L\'evy process with secondary jump inputs and its reflected version

We study the the stochastic properties of the area under some function of the difference between (i) a spectrally positive L\'evy process $W_t^x$ that jumps to a level $x>0$ whenever it hits zero, and (ii) its reflected version $W_t$. Remarkably, even though the analysis of each of these processes is challenging, we succeed in attaining explicit expressions for their difference. The main result concerns the Laplace-Stieltjes transform of the integral $A_x$ of (a function of) the distance between $W_t^x$ and $W_t$ until $W_t^x$ hits zero. This result is extended in a number of directions, including the area between $A_x$ and $A_y$ and a Gaussian limit theorem. We conclude the paper with an inventory problem for which our results are particularly useful