This research studies the robustness of permanence and the continuous dependence of the stationary distribution on the parameters for a stochastic predator–prey model with Beddington–DeAngelis functional response. We show that if the model is extinct (resp. permanent) for a parameter, it is still extinct (resp. permanent) in a neighbourhood of this parameter. In the case of extinction, the Lyapunov exponent of predator quantity is negative and the prey quantity converges almost to the saturated situation, where the predator is absent at an exponential rate. Under the condition of permanence, the unique stationary distribution converges weakly to the degenerate measure concentrated at the unique limit cycle or at the globally asymptotic equilibrium when the diffusion term tends to 0.
We consider De Finetti’s control problem for absolutely continuous strategies with control rates bounded by a concave function and prove that a generalized mean-reverting strategy is optimal in a Brownian model. In order to solve this problem, we need to deal with a nonlinear Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. Despite the level of generality of the bound imposed on the rate, an explicit expression for the value function is obtained up to the evaluation of two functions. This optimal control problem has, as special cases, those solved in Jeanblanc-Picqué and Shiryaev (1995) and Renaud and Simard (2021) when the control rate is bounded by a constant and a linear function, respectively.
We introduce an extension to Kermack and McKendrick’s classic susceptible–infected–recovered (SIR) model in epidemiology, whose underlying mechanism of infection consists of individuals attending randomly generated social gatherings. This gives rise to a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) where the force of the infection term depends non-linearly on the proportion of infected individuals. Some specific instances yield models already studied in the literature, to which the present work provides a probabilistic foundation. The basic reproduction number is seen to depend quadratically on the average size of the gatherings, which may be helpful in understanding how restrictions on social gatherings affect the spread of the disease. We rigorously justify our model by showing that the system of ODEs is the mean-field limit of the jump Markov process corresponding to the evolution of the disease in a finite population.