Coherent distributions on the square–extreme points and asymptotics

Abstract

Abstract Let $\mathcal{C}$ denote the family of all coherent distributions on the unit square $[0,1]^2$ , i.e. all those probability measures $\mu$ for which there exists a random vector $(X,Y)\sim \mu$ , a pair $(\mathcal{G},\mathcal{H})$ of $\sigma$ -fields, and an event E such that $X=\mathbb{P}(E\mid\mathcal{G})$ , $Y=\mathbb{P}(E\mid\mathcal{H})$ almost surely. We examine the set $\mathrm{ext}(\mathcal{C})$ of extreme points of $\mathcal{C}$ and provide its general characterisation. Moreover, we establish several structural properties of finitely-supported elements of $\mathrm{ext}(\mathcal{C})$ . We apply these results to obtain the asymptotic sharp bound $\lim_{\alpha \to \infty}\alpha\cdot(\sup_{(X,Y)\in \mathcal{C}}\mathbb{E}|X-Y|^{\alpha}) = {2}/{\mathrm{e}}$ .