Short time solution to the master equation of a first order mean field game

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show existence of short-time classical solutions to the so called Master Equation of first order Mean Field Games, which can be thought of as the limit of the corresponding master equation of a stochastic mean field game as the individual noises approach zero. Despite being the equation of an idealistic model, its study is justified as a way of understanding mean field games in which the individual players' randomness is negligible; in this sense it can be compared to the study of ideal fluids. We restrict ourselves to mean field games with smooth coefficients but do not impose any monotonicity conditions on the running and initial costs, and we do not require convexity of the Hamiltonian, thus extending the result of Gangbo and Swiech to a considerably broader class of Hamiltonians.