Cemracs 2017: numerical probabilistic approach to MFG

¹ Department of Statistics and Applied Probability, University of California Santa Barbara
² Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University
³ Laboratoire de Probabilités, Modélisation et Statistiques, Université Paris Diderot
⁴ Laboratoire Jean-Alexandre Dieudonné, Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis
⁵ Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Bendheim Center for Finance, Princeton University

Abstract

This project investigates numerical methods for solving fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs) of McKean-Vlasov type. Having numerical solvers for such mean field FBSDEs is of interest because of the potential application of these equations to optimization problems over a large population, say for instance mean field games (MFG) and optimal mean field control problems. Theory for this kind of problems has met with great success since the early works on mean field games by Lasry and Lions, see [29], and by Huang, Caines, and Malhamé, see [26]. Generally speaking, the purpose is to understand the continuum limit of optimizers or of equilibria (say in Nash sense) as the number of underlying players tends to infinity. When approached from the probabilistic viewpoint, solutions to these control problems (or games) can be described by coupled mean field FBSDEs, meaning that the coefficients depend upon the own marginal laws of the solution. In this note, we detail two methods for solving such FBSDEs which we implement and apply to five benchmark problems. The first method uses a tree structure to represent the pathwise laws of the solution, whereas the second method uses a grid discretization to represent the time marginal laws of the solutions. Both are based on a Picard scheme; importantly, we combine each of them with a generic continuation method that permits to extend the time horizon (or equivalently the coupling strength between the two equations) for which the Picard iteration converges.