The planning problem in Mean Field Games as regularized mass transport

Abstract: In this paper, using variational approaches, we investigate the first order planning problem arising in the theory of mean field games. We show the existence and uniqueness of weak solutions of the problem in the case of a large class of Hamiltonians with arbitrary superlinear order of growth at infinity and local coupling functions. We require the initial and final measures to be merely summable. At the same time (relying on the techniques developed recently by Graber and M\'esz\'aros), under stronger monotonicity and convexity conditions on the data, we obtain Sobolev estimates on the solutions of the planning problem both for space and time derivatives.