Martingale Inequalities for the Maximum via Pathwise Arguments

Abstract: We study a class of martingale inequalities involving the running maximum process. They are derived from pathwise inequalities introduced by Henry_Labordere et al. (2013) and provide an upper bound on the expectation of a function of the running maximum in terms of marginal distributions at n intermediate time points. The class of inequalities is rich and we show that in general no inequality is uniformly sharp - for any two inequalities we specify martingales such that one or the other inequality is sharper. We then use our inequalities to recover Doob's L^p inequalities. For p in (0,1] we obtain new, or refined, inequalities.