Interior regularity of fully nonlinear degenerate elliptic equations, I: Bellman equations with constant coefficients

This is the first of a series of papers on the interior regularity of fully nonlinear degenerate elliptic equations. We consider a stochastic optimal control problem in which the diffusion coefficients, drift coefficients and discount factor are independent of the spacial variables. Under suitable assumptions, for $k=0,1$, when the terminal and running payoffs are globally $C^{k,1}$, we obtain the $C^{k,1}$-smoothness of the value function, which yields the existence and uniqueness of the solution to the associated Dirichlet problem for the degenerate Bellman equation.