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We investigate a linear–quadratic stochastic zero-sum game where two players lobby a political representative to invest in a wind farm. Players are time-inconsistent because they discount the utility with a non-constant rate. Our objective is to identify a consistent planning equilibrium in which the players are aware of their inconsistency and cannot commit to a lobbying policy. We analyse equilibrium behaviour in both single-player and two-player cases and compare the behaviours of the game under constant and variable discount rates. The equilibrium behaviour is provided in closed-loop form, either analytically or via numerical approximation. Our numerical analysis of the equilibrium reveals that strategic behaviour leads to more intense lobbying without resulting in overshooting. 

A linear-quadratic optimal control problem for a forward stochastic Volterra integral equation (FSVIE) is considered. Under the usual convexity conditions, open-loop optimal control exists, which can be characterized by the optimality system, a coupled system of an FSVIE and a type-II backward SVIE (BSVIE). To obtain a causal state feedback representation for the open-loop optimal control, a path-dependent Riccati equation for an operator-valued function is introduced, via which the optimality system can be decoupled. In the process of decoupling, a type-III BSVIE is introduced whose adapted solution can be used to represent the adapted M-solution of the corresponding type-II BSVIE. Under certain conditions, it is proved that the path-dependent Riccati equation admits a unique solution, which means that the decoupling field for the optimality system is found. Therefore, a causal state feedback representation of the open-loop optimal control is constructed. An additional interesting finding is that when the control only appears in the diffusion term, not in the drift term of the state system, the causal state feedback reduces to a Markovian state feedback. 

An optimal control problem is considered for a stochastic differential equation with the cost functional determined by a backward stochastic Volterra integral equation (BSVIE, for short). This kind of cost functional can cover the general discounting (including exponential and non-exponential) situations with a recursive feature. It is known that such a problem is time-inconsistent in general. Therefore, instead of finding a global optimal control, we look for a time-consistent locally near optimal equilibrium strategy. With the idea of multi-person differential games, a family of approximate equilibrium strategies is constructed associated with partitions of the time intervals. By sending the mesh size of the time interval partition to zero, an equilibrium Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB, for short) equation is derived, through which the equilibrium value function and an equilibrium strategy are obtained. Under certain conditions, a verification theorem is proved and the well-posedness of the equilibrium HJB is established. As a sort of Feynman–Kac formula for the equilibrium HJB equation, a new class of BSVIEs (containing the diagonal value Z ( r , r ) of Z (⋅ , ⋅)) is naturally introduced and the well-posedness of such kind of equations is briefly presented.