Stochastic variational inequalities and optimal stopping: applications to the robustness of the portfolio/consumption processes

We give a new characterization of the Snell envelope of a given process as the unique solution of the stochastic variational inequality (SVI) in this article. This approach leads to several a priori estimates for the Snell envelopes and their components. The valuation for American Contingent Claims (ACC) in general financial market model is considered as an application. The robustness of the optimal portfolio/consumption processes with respect to the payoff function is established.