On Social Optima of Non-Cooperative Mean Field Games

Abstract: This paper studies the connections between mean-field games and the social welfare optimization problems. We consider a mean field game in functional spaces with a large population of agents, each of which seeks to minimize an individual cost function. The cost functions of different agents are coupled through a mean field term that depends on the mean of the population states. We show that under some mild conditions any $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium of the mean field game coincides with the optimal solution to a convex social welfare optimization problem. The results are proved based on a general formulation in the functional spaces and can be applied to a variety of mean field games studied in the literature. Our result also implies that the computation of the mean field equilibrium can be cast as a convex optimization problem, which can be efficiently solved by a decentralized primal dual algorithm. Numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.