The Shepp-Shiryaev stochastic game driven by a spectrally negative Lévy process

In [15], the stochastic-game-analogue of Shepp and Shiryaev’s optimal stopping problem (cf. [23] and [24]) was considered when driven by an exponential Brownian motion. We consider the same stochastic game, which we call the Shepp–Shiryaev stochastic game, but driven by a spectrally negative L´evy process and for a wider parameter range. Unlike [15], we do not appeal predominantly to stochastic analytic methods. Principally, this is due to difficulties in writing down variational inequalities of candidate solutions on account of then having to work with nonlocal integro-differential operators. We appeal instead to a mixture of techniques including fluctuation theory, stochastic analytic methods associated with martingale characterisations and reduction of the stochastic game to an optimal stopping problem.