Bellman Systems with Mean Field Dependent Dynamics

The authors deal with nonlinear elliptic and parabolic systems that are the Bellman like systems associated to stochastic differential games with mean field dependent dynamics. The key novelty of the paper is that they allow heavily mean field dependent dynamics. This in particular leads to a system of PDE's with critical growth,for which it is rare to have an existence and/or regularity result. In the paper,they introduce a structural assumptions that cover many cases in stochastic differential games with mean field dependent dynamics for which they are able to establish the existence of a weak solution. In addition,the authors present here a completely new method for obtaining the maximum/minimum principles for systems with critical growths,which is a starting point for further existence and also qualitative analysis.

Nash and Stackelberg Differential Games

A large class of stochastic differential games for several players is considered in this paper.The class includes Nash differential games as well as Stackelberg differential games.A mix is possible.The existence of feedback strategies under general conditions is proved.The limitations concern the functionals in which the state and the controls appear separately.This is also true for the state equations.The controls appear in a quadratic form for the payoff and linearly in the state equation.The most serious restriction is the dimension of the state equation,which cannot exceed 2.The reason comes from PDE(partial differential equations) techniques used in studying the system of Bellman equations obtained by Dynamic Programming arguments.In the authors' previous work in 2002,there is not such a restriction,but there are serious restrictions on the structure of the Hamiltonians,which are violated in the applications dealt with in this article.

Control and Nash Games with Mean Field Effect

Mean field theory has raised a lot of interest in the recent years (see in particular the results of Lasry-Lions in 2006 and 2007,of Gueant-Lasry-Lions in 2011,of HuangCaines-Malham in 2007 and many others).There are a lot of applications.In general,the applications concern approximating an infinite number of players with common behavior by a representative agent.This agent has to solve a control problem perturbed by a field equation,representing in some way the behavior of the average infinite number of agents.This approach does not lead easily to the problems of Nash equilibrium for a finite number of players,perturbed by field equations,unless one considers averaging within different groups,which has not been done in the literature,and seems quite challenging.In this paper,the authors approach similar problems with a different motivation which makes sense for control and also for differential games.Thus the systems of nonlinear partial differential equations with mean field terms,which have not been addressed in the literature so far,are considered here.