Control of McKean-Vlasov systems and applications.

Summary This thesis studies the optimal control of McKean-Vlasov type dynamics and its applications in financial mathematics. The thesis contains two parts. In the first part, we develop the dynamic programming method for solving McKean-Vlasov type stochastic control problems. By using the appropriate admissible controls, we can reformulate the value function in terms of the law (resp. the conditional law) of the process as the only state variable and obtain the flow property of the law (resp. the conditional law) of the process, which allow us to obtain the principle of dynamic programming in all generality. Then we obtain the corresponding Bellman equation, based on the notion of differentiability with respect to probability measures introduced by P.L. Lions [Lio12] and the Itô formula for the probability stream. Finally we show the viscosity property and the uniqueness of the value function of the Bellman equation. In the first chapter, we summarize some useful results from differential calculus and stochastic analysis on the Wasserstein space. In the second chapter, we consider stochastic optimal control of nonlinear mean-field systems in discrete time. The third chapter studies the stochastic optimal control problem of McKean-Vlasov type EDS without common noise in continuous time where the coefficients can depend on the joint state and control law, and finally in the last chapter of this part we are interested in the optimal control of McKean-Vlasov type stochastic dynamics in the presence of common noise in continuous time. In the second part, we propose a robust portfolio allocation model allowing for uncertainty in the expected return and the correlation matrix of multiple assets, in a continuous time mean-variance framework. This problem is formulated as a mean-field differential game. We then show a separation principle for the associated problem. Our explicit results provide a quantitative justification for underdiversification, as shown in empirical studies.