Martingale approach to control for general jump processes

Abstract: We provide verification theorems (at different levels of generality) for infinite horizon stochastic control problems in continuous time for semimartingales. The control framework is given as an abstract "martingale formulation", which encompasses a broad range of standard control problems. Under appropriate conditions we show that the set of admissible controls gives rise to a certain class of controlled special semimartingales. Our results generalise both the standard controlled It^o- and L\'evy-diffusion settings as we allow ourselves to locally control not only the drift and diffusion coefficients, but also the jump intensity measure of the jumps. As an illustration, we present a few examples with explicit solutions.