Dual attainment for the martingale transport problem

Abstract

We investigate existence of dual optimizers in one-dimensional martingale optimal transport problems. While [Ann. Probab. 45 (2017) 3038–3074] established such existence for weak (quasi-sure) duality, [Finance Stoch. 17 (2013) 477–501] showed existence for the natural stronger (pointwise) duality may fail even in regular cases. We establish that (pointwise) dual maximizers exist when $y\mapsto c(x,y)$ is convex, or equivalent to a convex function. It follows that when marginals are compactly supported, the existence holds when the cost $c(x,y)$ is twice continuously differentiable in $y$. Further, this may not be improved as we give examples with $c(x,\cdot)\in C^{2-\varepsilon}$, $\varepsilon>0$, where dual attainment fails. Finally, when measures are compactly supported, we show that dual optimizers are Lipschitz if $c$ is Lipschitz.