Lecture notes on variational mean field games (Q2223589)

The author considers first-order Mean Field Games (MFG) with local couplings. The theory of MFG describe the evolution of a population of rational agents, each one choosing a path in a state space, according to some preferences which are affected by the presence of other agents nearby in a way physicists call mean-field effect. The main goal of the article is to prove that minimizers of a suitably expressed global energy are equilibria in the sense that a. e. trajectory solves a control problem with a running cost depending on the density of all the agents. Both the case of a cost penalizing high densities and of an \(L^{\infty}\) constraint on the same densities are considered. For the entire collection see [Zbl 1456.49002].