Process-Based Risk Measures and Risk-Averse Control of Discrete-Time Systems

Abstract: For controlled discrete-time stochastic processes we introduce a new class of dynamic risk measures, which we call process-based. Their main features are that they measure risk of processes that are functions of the history of a base process. We introduce a new concept of conditional stochastic time consistency and we derive the structure of process-based risk measures enjoying this property. We show that they can be equivalently represented by a collection of static law-invariant risk measures on the space of functions of the state of the base process. We apply this result to controlled Markov processes and we derive dynamic programming equations.