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8
Poisson Processes and Ruin Theory
We give in this chapter the main results on Poisson processes, which are
basic examples of jump processes. Despite their elementary properties they
are building blocks of jump process theory. We present various generalizations
such as inhomogeneous Poisson processes and compound Poisson processes.
These processes are not used to model financial prices, due to the simple
character of their jumps and are in practice mixed with Brownian motion, as
we shall present in Chapter 10. However, they represent the main model in
insurance theory. We end this chapter with two sections about point processes
and marked point processes.
The reader can refer to C¸inlar [188], Cocozza-Thivent [190], Karlin and
Taylor [515] and the last chapter in Shreve [795] for the study of standard
Poisson processes, to Br´emaud [124] for general Poisson processes, and to
Jacod and Shiryaev [471], Kallenberg [504], Kingman [523], Last and Brandt
[565], Neveu [669], Prigent [725] and Protter [727] for point processes, and to
Mikosch [651, 652] for applications.
8.1 Counting Processes and Stochastic Integrals
A counting process is a process which increases in unit steps at isolated
times and is constant between these times. It can be constructed as follows. Let
(T
n
,n≥ 0) be a sequence of random variables defined on the same probability
space (Ω,F, P) such that
T
0
=0,T
n
<T
n+1
for T
n
< ∞.
This sequence models the times when jumps occur. We define the family of
random variables, for t ≥ 0,
N
t
=
n if t ∈ [T
n
,T
n+1
[
+∞ otherwise,
M. Jeanblanc, M. Yor, M. Chesney, Mathematical Methods for Financial
Markets, Springer Finance, DOI 10.1007/978-1-84628-737-4
8,
c
Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009
457