STOCHASTIC LINEAR QUADRATIC OPTIMAL CONTROL PROBLEMS WITH RANDOM COEFFICIENTS

This paper studies a stochastic linear quadratic optimal control problem (LQ problem, for short), for which the coefficients are allowed to be random and the cost functional is allowed to have a negative weight on the square of the control variable. The authors introduce the stochastic Riccati equation for the LQ problem. This is a backward SDE with a complicated nonlinearity and a singularity. The local solvability of such a backward SDE is established, which by no means is obvious. For the case of deterministic coefficients, some further discussions on the Riccati equations have been carried out. Finally, an illustrative example is presented.