Stochastic monotonicity from an Eulerian viewpoint

Stochastic monotonicity is a well known partial order relation between probability measures defined on the same partially ordered set. Strassen Theorem establishes equivalence between stochastic monotonicity and the existence of a coupling compatible with respect to the partial order. We consider the case of a countable set and introduce the class of emph{finitely decomposable flows} on a directed acyclic graph associated to the partial order. We show that a probability measure stochastically dominates another probability measure if and only if there exists a finitely decomposable flow having divergence given by the difference of the two measures. We illustrate the result with some examples.