Uniqueness for contagious McKean--Vlasov systems in the weak feedback regime

Abstract: We present a simple uniqueness argument for a collection of McKean-Vlasov problems that have seen recent interest. Our first result shows that, in the weak feedback regime, there is global uniqueness for a very general class of random drivers. By weak feedback we mean the case where the contagion parameters are small enough to prevent blow-ups in solutions. Next, we specialise to a Brownian driver and show how the same techniques can be extended to give short-time uniqueness after blow-ups, regardless of the feedback strength. The heart of our approach is a surprisingly simple probabilistic comparison argument that is robust in the sense that it does not ask for any regularity of the solutions.