Time discretization of FBSDE with polynomial growth drivers and reaction-diffusion PDEs

In this paper, we undertake the error analysis of the time discretization of systems of Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (FBSDEs) with drivers having polynomial growth and that are also monotone in the state variable. We show with a counter-example that the natural explicit Euler scheme may diverge, unlike in the canonical Lipschitz driver case. This is due to the lack of a certain stability property of the Euler scheme which is essential to obtain convergence. However, a thorough analysis of the family of $\theta$-schemes reveals that this required stability property can be recovered if the scheme is sufficiently implicit. As a by-product of our analysis, we shed some light on higher order approximation schemes for FBSDEs under non-Lipschitz condition. We then return to fully explicit schemes and show that an appropriately tamed version of the explicit Euler scheme enjoys the required stability property and as a consequence converges. In order to establish convergence of the several discretizations, we extend the canonical path- and first-order variational regularity results to FBSDEs with polynomial growth drivers which are also monotone. These results are of independent interest for the theory of FBSDEs.