English

Major-Minor Mean Field Game of Stopping: An Entropy Regularization Approach

Optimization and Control 2025-10-13 v2

Abstract

This paper studies a discrete-time major-minor mean field game of stopping where the major player can choose either an optimal control or stopping time. We look for the relaxed equilibrium as a randomized stopping policy, which is formulated as a fixed point of a set-valued mapping, whose existence is challenging by direct arguments. To overcome the difficulties caused by the presence of a major player, we propose to study an auxiliary problem by considering entropy regularization in the major player's problem while formulating the minor players' optimal stopping problems as linear programming over occupation measures. We first show the existence of regularized equilibria as fixed points of some simplified set-valued operator using the Kakutani-Fan-Glicksberg fixed-point theorem. Next, we prove that the regularized equilibrium converges as the regularization parameter λ\lambda tends to 0, and the limit corresponds to a fixed point of the original operator, thereby confirming the existence of a relaxed equilibrium in the original mean field game problem. We also extend this entropy regularization method to the mean-field game problem where the minor players choose optimal controls.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.08770,
  title  = {Major-Minor Mean Field Game of Stopping: An Entropy Regularization Approach},
  author = {Xiang Yu and Jiacheng Zhang and Keyu Zhang and Zhou Zhou},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.08770},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

keywords: Major-minor mean field game of stopping, Markov decision processes, relaxed equilibrium, entropy regularization, linear programming, fixed point