On Wald's equations in continuous time

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Abstract
Various formulas of Wald relating to randomly stopped sums have well known continuous-time analogs, holding in particular for Wiener processes. However, sufficiently general forms of most of these do not appear explicitly in the literature. Recent papers by Robbins and Samuel (1966) and by Brown (1969) provide general results on Wald's equations in discrete time and these are here extended (Theorems 2 and 3) to Wiener processes and other homogeneous additive processes, that is, continuous-time processes with stationary independent increments. We also give an inequality (Theorem 1) related to Wald's identity in continuous time, and we derive, as corollaries of Wald's equations, bounds on the variance of an arbitrary stopping time. The Wiener process versions of these results find application in a variety of stopping problems. Specifically, all are used in Hall ((1968), (1969)); see also Bechhofer, Kiefer, and Sobel (1968), Root (1969), and Shepp (1967).

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