Laplace principle for large population games with control interaction

Abstract

This work investigates continuous time stochastic differential games with a large number of players whose costs and dynamics interact through the empirical distribution of both their states and their controls. The control processes are assumed to be open-loop. We give regularity conditions guaranteeing that if the finite-player game admits a Nash equilibrium, then both the sequence of equilibria and the corresponding state processes satisfy a Sanov-type large deviation principle. The results require existence of a Lipschitz continuous solution of the master equation of the corresponding mean field game, and they carry over to cooperative (i.e. central planner) games. We study a linear-quadratic case of such games in details.