A deterministic‐control‐based approach to fully nonlinear parabolic and elliptic equations

We show that a broad class of fully nonlinear, second‐order parabolic or elliptic PDEs can be realized as the Hamilton‐Jacobi‐Bellman equations of deterministic two‐person games. More precisely: given the PDE, we identify a deterministic, discrete‐time, two‐person game whose value function converges in the continuous‐time limit to the viscosity solution of the desired equation. Our game is, roughly speaking, a deterministic analogue of the stochastic representation recently introduced by Cheridito, Soner, Touzi, and Victoir. In the parabolic setting with no u‐dependence, it amounts to a semidiscrete numerical scheme whose timestep is a min‐max. Our result is interesting, because the usual control‐based interpretations of second‐order PDEs involve stochastic rather than deterministic control.