Necessity of transversality conditions for stochastic problems

This paper establishes (i) an extension of Michel’s (1990, Theorem 1) necessity result to an abstract reduced-form model, (ii) a generalization of the results of Weitzman (1973) and Ekeland and Scheinkman (1986), and (iii) a new result that is useful particularly in the case of homogeneous returns. These results are shown for an extremely general discrete-time reduced-form model that does not assume differentiability, continuity, or concavity, and that imposes virtually no restriction on the state spaces. The three results are further extended to a stochastic reduced-form model. The stochastic extensions are easily accomplished since our deterministic model is so general that the stochastic model is in fact a special case of the deterministic model. We apply our stochastic results to a stochastic reduced-form model with homogeneous returns and a general type of stochastic growth model with CRRA utility.