François Delarue – författare

This book describes the latest advances in the theory of mean field games, which are optimal control problems with a continuum of players, each of them interacting with the whole statistical distribution of a population. While it originated in economics, this theory now has applications in areas as diverse as mathematical finance, crowd phenomena, epidemiology, and cybersecurity.Because mean field games concern the interactions of infinitely many players in an optimal control framework, one expects them to appear as the limit for Nash equilibria of differential games with finitely many players as the number of players tends to infinity. This book rigorously establishes this convergence, which has been an open problem until now. The limit of the system associated with differential games with finitely many players is described by the so-called master equation, a nonlocal transport equation in the space of measures. After defining a suitable notion of differentiability in the space of measures, the authors provide a complete self-contained analysis of the master equation. Their analysis includes the case of common noise problems in which all the players are affected by a common Brownian motion. They then go on to explain how to use the master equation to prove the mean field limit.This groundbreaking book presents two important new results in mean field games that contribute to a unified theoretical framework for this exciting and fast-developing area of mathematics.

This volume provides an introduction to the theory of Mean Field Games, suggested by J.-M. Lasry and P.-L. Lions in 2006 as a mean-field model for Nash equilibria in the strategic interaction of a large number of agents. 

Besides giving an accessible presentation of the main features of mean-field game theory, the volume offers an overview of recent developments which explore several important directions: from partial differential equations to stochastic analysis, from the calculus of variations to modeling and aspects related to numerical methods. Arising from the CIME Summer School "Mean Field Games" held in Cetraro in 2019, this book collects together lecture notes prepared by Y. Achdou (with M. Laurière), P. Cardaliaguet, F. Delarue, A. Porretta and F. Santambrogio.

These notes will be valuable for researchers and advanced graduate students who wish to approach this theory and explore its connections with several different fields in mathematics.

This two-volume book offers a comprehensive treatment of the probabilistic approach to mean field game models and their applications. The book is self-contained in nature and includes original material and applications with explicit examples throughout, including numerical solutions.

Volume II tackles the analysis of mean field games in which the players are affected by a common source of noise. The first part of the volume introduces and studies the concepts of weak and strong equilibria, and establishes general solvability results. The second part is devoted to the study of the master equation, a partial differential equation satisfied by the value function of the game over the space of probability measures. Existence of viscosity and classical solutions are proven and used to study asymptotics of games with finitely many players.