Characterization of infinite divisibility by duality formulas. Application to Lévy processes and random measures

Processes with independent increments are proven to be the unique solutions of duality formulas. This result is based on a simple characterization of infinitely divisible random vectors by a functional equation in which a difference operator appears. This operator is constructed by a variational method and compared to approaches involving chaos decompositions. We also obtain a related characterization of infinitely divisible random measures.