We study the asymptotic organization among many optimizing individuals interacting in a suitable moderate way. We justify this limiting game by proving that its solution provides approximate Nash equilibria for large but finite player games. This proof depends upon the derivation of a law of large numbers for the empirical processes in the limit as the number of players tends to infinity. Because it is of independent interest, we prove this result in full detail. We characterize the solutions of the limiting game via a verification argument.
Mean-field games with absorption is a class of games, that have been introduced in Campi and Fischer [7] and that can be viewed as natural limits of symmetric stochastic differential games with a large number of players who, interacting through a mean-field, leave the game as soon as their private states hit some given boundary. In this paper, we push the study of such games further, extending their scope along two main directions. First, a direct dependence on past absorptions has been introduced in the drift of players state dynamics. Second, the boundedness of coefficients and costs has been considerably relaxed including drift and costs with linear growth. Therefore, the mean-field interaction among the players takes place in two ways: via the empirical sub-probability measure of the surviving players and through a process representing the fraction of past absorptions over time. Moreover, relaxing the boundedness of the coefficients allows for more realistic dynamics for players private states. We prove existence of solutions of the mean-field game in strict as well as relaxed feedback form. Finally, we show that such solutions induce approximate Nash equilibria for the $N$-player game with vanishing error in the mean-field limit as $N to infty$.
Mean field games are concerned with the limit of large-population stochastic differential games where the agents interact through their empirical distribution. In the classical setting, the number of players is large but fixed throughout the game. However, in various applications, such as population dynamics or economic growth, the number of players can vary across time which may lead to different Nash equilibria. For this reason, we introduce a branching mechanism in the population of agents and obtain a variation on the mean field game problem. As a first step, we study a simple model using a PDE approach to illustrate the main differences with the classical setting. We prove existence of a solution and show that it provides an approximate Nash-equilibrium for large population games. We also present a numerical example for a linear--quadratic model. Then we study the problem in a general setting by a probabilistic approach. It is based upon the relaxed formulation of stochastic control problems which allows us to obtain a general existence result.
We propose and investigate a general class of discrete time and finite state space mean field game (MFG) problems with potential structure. Our model incorporates interactions through a congestion term and a price variable. It also allows hard constraints on the distribution of the agents. We analyze the connection between the MFG problem and two optimal control problems in duality. We present two families of numerical methods and detail their implementation: (i) primal-dual proximal methods (and their extension with nonlinear proximity operators), (ii) the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and a variant called ADM-G. We give some convergence results. Numerical results are provided for two examples with hard constraints.
Forcing finite state mean field games by a relevant form of common noise is a subtle issue, which has been addressed only recently. Among others, one possible way is to subject the simplex valued dynamics of an equilibrium by a so-called Wright-Fisher noise, very much in the spirit of stochastic models in population genetics. A key feature is that such a random forcing preserves the structure of the simplex, which is nothing but, in this setting, the probability space over the state space of the game. The purpose of this article is hence to elucidate the finite player version and, accordingly, to prove that $N$-player equilibria indeed converge towards the solution of such a kind of Wright-Fisher mean field game. Whilst part of the analysis is made easier by the fact that the corresponding master equation has already been proved to be uniquely solvable under the presence of the common noise, it becomes however more subtle than in the standard setting because the mean field interaction between the players now occurs through a weighted empirical measure. In other words, each player carries its own weight, which hence may differ from $1/N$ and which, most of all, evolves with the common noise.
Mean field games with a major player were introduced in (Huang, 2010) within a linear-quadratic (LQ) modeling framework. Due to the rich structure of major-minor player models, the past ten years have seen significant research efforts for different solution notions and analytical techniques. For LQ models, we address the relation between three solution frameworks: the Nash certainty equivalence (NCE) approach in (Huang, 2010), master equations, and asymptotic solvability, which have been developed starting with different ideas. We establish their equivalence relationships.