A Technique for Stochastic Control Problems with Unbounded Control Set

We describe a change of time technique for stochastic control problems with unbounded control set. We demonstrate the technique on a class of maximization problems that do not have optimal controls. Given such a problem, we introduce an extended problem which has the same value function as the original problem and for which there exist optimal controls that are expressible in simple terms. This device yields a natural sequence of suboptimal controls for the original problem. By this we mean a sequence of controls for which the payoff functions approach the value function.