We consider competitive capacity investment for a duopoly of two distinct producers. The producers are exposed to stochastically fluctuating costs and interact through aggregate supply. Capacity expansion is irreversible and modeled in terms of timing strategies characterized through threshold rules. Because the impact of changing costs on the producers is asymmetric, we are led to a nonzero-sum timing game describing the transitions among the discrete investment stages. Working in a continuous-time diffusion framework, we characterize and analyze the resulting Nash equilibrium and game values. Our analysis quantifies the dynamic competition effects and yields insight into dynamic preemption and over-investment in a general asymmetric setting. A case-study considering the impact of fluctuating emission costs on power producers investing in nuclear and coal-fired plants is also presented.[-]

In this lecture, we shall discuss the key steps involved in the use of least squares regression for approximating the solution to BSDEs. This includes how to obtain explicit error estimates, and how these error estimates can be used to tune the parameters of the numerical scheme based on complexity considerations.
The algorithms are based on a two stage approximation process. Firstly, a suitable discrete time process is chosen to approximate the of the continuous time solution of the BSDE. The nodes of the discrete time processes can be expressed as conditional expectations. As we shall demonstrate, the choice of discrete time process is very important, as its properties will impact the performance of the overall numerical scheme. In the second stage, the conditional expectation is approximated in functional form using least squares regression on synthetically generated data – Monte Carlo simulations drawn from a suitable probability distribution. A key feature of the regression step is that the explanatory variables are built on a user chosen finite dimensional linear space of functions, which the user specifies by setting basis functions. The choice of basis functions is made on the hypothesis that it contains the solution, so regularity and boundedness assumptions are used in its construction. The impact of the choice of the basis functions is exposed in error estimates.
In addition to the choice of discrete time approximation and the basis functions, the Markovian structure of the problem gives significant additional freedom with regards to the Monte Carlo simulations. We demonstrate how to use this additional freedom to develop generic stratified sampling approaches that are independent of the underlying transition density function. Moreover, we demonstrate how to leverage the stratification method to develop a HPC algorithm for implementation on GPUs.
Thanks to the Feynmann-Kac relation between the the solution of a BSDE and its associated semilinear PDE, the approximation of the BSDE can be directly used to approximate the solution of the PDE. Moreover, the smoothness properties of the PDE play a crucial role in the selection of the hypothesis space of regressions functions, so this relationship is vitally important for the numerical scheme.
We conclude with some draw backs of the regression approach, notably the curse of dimensionality.[-]

Recently, an important research activity on mean field games (MFGs for short) has been initiated by the pioneering works of Lasry and Lions: it aims at studying the asymptotic behavior of stochastic differential games (Nash equilibria) as the number $n$ of agents tends to infinity. The field is now rapidly growing in several directions, including stochastic optimal control, analysis of PDEs, calculus of variations, numerical analysis and computing, and the potential applications to economics and social sciences are numerous.
In the limit when $n \to +\infty$, a given agent feels the presence of the others through the statistical distribution of the states. Assuming that the perturbations of a single agent's strategy does not influence the statistical states distribution, the latter acts as a parameter in the control problem to be solved by each agent. When the dynamics of the agents are independent stochastic processes, MFGs naturally lead to a coupled system of two partial differential equations (PDEs for short), a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.
The latter system of PDEs has closed form solutions in very few cases only. Therefore, numerical simulation are crucial in order to address applications. The present mini-course will be devoted to numerical methods that can be used to approximate the systems of PDEs.
The numerical schemes that will be presented rely basically on monotone approximations of the Hamiltonian and on a suitable weak formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation.
These schemes have several important features:

- The discrete problem has the same structure as the continous one, so existence, energy estimates, and possibly uniqueness can be obtained with the same kind of arguments

- Monotonicity guarantees the stability of the scheme: it is robust in the deterministic limit

- convergence to classical or weak solutions can be proved

Finally, there are particular cases named variational MFGS in which the system of PDEs can be seen as the optimality conditions of some optimal control problem driven by a PDE. In such cases, augmented Lagrangian methods can be used for solving the discrete nonlinear system. The mini-course will be orgamized as follows

1. Introduction to the system of PDEs and its interpretation. Uniqueness of classical solutions.

2. Monotone finite difference schemes

3. Examples of applications

4. Variational MFG and related algorithms for solving the discrete system of nonlinear equations[-]

Recently, an important research activity on mean field games (MFGs for short) has been initiated by the pioneering works of Lasry and Lions: it aims at studying the asymptotic behavior of stochastic differential games (Nash equilibria) as the number $n$ of agents tends to infinity. The field is now rapidly growing in several directions, including stochastic optimal control, analysis of PDEs, calculus of variations, numerical analysis and computing, and the potential applications to economics and social sciences are numerous.
In the limit when $n \to +\infty$, a given agent feels the presence of the others through the statistical distribution of the states. Assuming that the perturbations of a single agent's strategy does not influence the statistical states distribution, the latter acts as a parameter in the control problem to be solved by each agent. When the dynamics of the agents are independent stochastic processes, MFGs naturally lead to a coupled system of two partial differential equations (PDEs for short), a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.
The latter system of PDEs has closed form solutions in very few cases only. Therefore, numerical simulation are crucial in order to address applications. The present mini-course will be devoted to numerical methods that can be used to approximate the systems of PDEs.
The numerical schemes that will be presented rely basically on monotone approximations of the Hamiltonian and on a suitable weak formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation.
These schemes have several important features:

- The discrete problem has the same structure as the continous one, so existence, energy estimates, and possibly uniqueness can be obtained with the same kind of arguments

- Monotonicity guarantees the stability of the scheme: it is robust in the deterministic limit

- convergence to classical or weak solutions can be proved

Finally, there are particular cases named variational MFGS in which the system of PDEs can be seen as the optimality conditions of some optimal control problem driven by a PDE. In such cases, augmented Lagrangian methods can be used for solving the discrete nonlinear system. The mini-course will be orgamized as follows

1. Introduction to the system of PDEs and its interpretation. Uniqueness of classical solutions.

2. Monotone finite difference schemes

3. Examples of applications

4. Variational MFG and related algorithms for solving the discrete system of nonlinear equations[-]

The theory of mean field type control (or control of MacKean-Vlasov) aims at describing the behaviour of a large number of agents using a common feedback control and interacting through some mean field term. The solution to this type of control problem can be seen as a collaborative optimum. We will present the system of partial differential equations (PDE) arising in this setting: a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. They describe respectively the evolution of the distribution of the agents' states and the evolution of the value function. Since it comes from a control problem, this PDE system differs in general from the one arising in mean field games.
Recently, this kind of model has been applied to crowd dynamics. More precisely, in this talk we will be interested in modeling congestion effects: the agents move but try to avoid very crowded regions. One way to take into account such effects is to let the cost of displacement increase in the regions where the density of agents is large. The cost may depend on the density in a non-local or in a local way. We will present one class of models for each case and study the associated PDE systems. The first one has classical solutions whereas the second one has weak solutions. Numerical results based on the Newton algorithm and the Augmented Lagrangian method will be presented.
This is joint work with Yves Achdou.[-]

Inspired by modeling in neurosciences, we here discuss the well-posedness of a networked integrate-and-fire model describing an infinite population of companies which interact with one another through their common statistical distribution. The interaction is of the self-excitatory type as, at any time, the debt of a company increases when some of the others default: precisely, the loss it receives is proportional to the instantaneous proportion of companies that default at the same time. From a mathematical point of view, the coefficient of proportionality, denoted by a, is of great importance as the resulting system is known to blow-up when a takes large values, a blow-up meaning that a macroscopic proportion of companies may default at the same time. In the current talk, we focus on the complementary regime and prove that existence and uniqueness hold in arbitrary time without any blow-up when the excitatory parameter is small enough.[-]

We introduce a new strategy for the solution of Mean Field Games in the presence of major and minor players. This approach is based on a formulation of the fixed point step in spaces of controls. We use it to highlight the differences between open and closed loop problems. We illustrate the implementation of this approach for linear quadratic and finite state space games, and we provide numerical results motivated by applications in biology and cyber-security.[-]

Backward stochastic differential equations have been a very successful and active tool for stochastic finance and insurance for some decades. More generally they serve as a central method in applications of control theory in many areas. We introduce BSDE by looking at a simple utility optimization problem in financial stochastics. We shall derive an important class of BSDE by applying the martingale optimality principle to solve an optimal investment problem for a financial agent whose income is partly affected by market external risk. We then present the basics of existence and uniqueness theory for solutions to BSDE the coefficients of which satisfy global Lipschitz conditions.[-]