Martingale problem under nonlinear expectations

We formulate and solve the martingale problem in a nonlinear expectation space. Unlike the classical work of Stroock and Varadhan (Commun Pure Appl Math 22:345-400, 479-530, 1969) where the linear operator in the associated PDE is naturally defined from the corresponding diffusion process, the main difficulty in the nonlinear setting is to identify an appropriate class of nonlinear operators for the associated fully nonlinear PDEs. Based on the analysis of the martingale problem, we introduce the notion of weak solution for stochastic differential equations under nonlinear expectations and obtain an existence theorem under the Lipschitz continuity condition of the coefficients. The approach to establish the existence of weak solutions generalizes the classical Girsanov transformation method in that it no longer requires the two (probability) measures to be absolutely continuous.