Paper detail

'Phase diagram' of a mean field game

Mean field games were introduced by J-M.Lasry and P-L. Lions in the mathematical community, and independently by M. Huang and co-workers in the engineering community, to deal with optimization problems when the number of agents becomes very large. In this article we study in detail a particular example called the 'seminar problem' introduced by O.Guéant, J-M Lasry, and P-L. Lions in 2010. This model contains the main ingredients of any mean field game but has the particular feature that all agent are coupled only through a simple random event (the seminar starting time) that they all contribute to form. In the mean field limit, this event becomes deterministic and its value can be fixed through a self consistent procedure. This allows for a rather thorough understanding of the solutions of the problem, through both exact results and a detailed analysis of various limiting regimes. For a sensible class of initial configurations, distinct behaviors can be associated to different domains in the parameter space . For this reason, the 'seminar problem' appears to be an interesting toy model on which both intuition and technical approaches can be tested as a preliminary study toward more complex mean field game models.