Penalization schemes for BSDEs and reflected BSDEs with generalized driver

The paper is directly motivated by the pricing of vulnerable European and American options in a general hazard process setup and a related study of the corresponding pre-default backward stochastic differential equations (BSDE) and pre-default reflected backward stochastic differential equations (RBSDE). The goal of this work is twofold. First, we aim to establish the well-posedness results and comparison theorems for a generalized BSDE and a reflected generalized BSDE with a continuous and nondecreasing driver A. Second, we study penalization schemes for a generalized BSDE and a reflected generalized BSDE in which we penalize against the driver in order to obtain in the limit either a constrained optimal stopping problem or a constrained Dynkin game in which the set of minimizer’s admissible exercise times is constrained to the right support of the measure generated by A.