Nonlinear Expectations and Nonlinear Markov Chains

This paper deals with nonlinear expectations. The author obtains a nonlinear generalization of the well-known Kolmogorov's consistent theorem and then use it to construct filtration-consistent nonlinear expectations via nonlinear Markov chains. Compared to the author's previous results, i.e., the theory of g-expectations introduced via BSDE on a probability space, the present framework is not based on a given probability measure. Many fully nonlinear and singular situations are covered. The induced topology is a natural generalization of Lp-norms and L∞-norm in linear situations. The author also obtains the existence and uniqueness result of BSDE under this new framework and develops a nonlinear type of von Neumann-Morgenstern representation theorem to utilities and present dynamic risk measures.