Over the past five years, multi-marginal optimal transport, a generalization of the well known optimal transport problem of Monge and Kantorovich, has begun to attract considerable attention, due in part to a wide variety of emerging applications. Here, we survey this problem, addressing fundamental theoretical questions including the uniqueness and structure of solutions. The answers to these questions uncover a surprising divergence from the classical two marginal setting, and reflect a delicate dependence on the cost function, which we then illustrate with a series of examples. We go one to describe some applications of the multi-marginal optimal transport problem, focusing primarily on matching in economics and density functional theory in physics.

We consider an optimal transportation problem with more than two marginals. We use a family of semi-Riemannian metrics derived from the mixed, second order partial derivatives of the cost function to provide upper bounds for the dimension of the support of the solution. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000)49N99 · 58E17 · 91B25

Abstract. We study a multimarginal optimal transportation problem. Under certain conditions on the cost function and the first marginal, we prove that the solution to the relaxed, Kantorovich version of the problem induces a solution to the Monge problem and that the solutions to both problems are unique. We also exhibit several examples of cost functions under which our conditions are satisfied, including one arising in a hedonic pricing model in mathematical economics.

We study barycenters in the space of probability measures on a Riemannian manifold, equipped with the Wasserstein metric. Under reasonable assumptions, we establish absolute continuity of the barycenter of general measures Ω ∈ P (P (M )) on Wasserstein space, extending on one hand, results in the Euclidean case (for barycenters between finitely many measures) of Agueh and Carlier [1] to the Riemannian setting, and on the other hand, results in the Riemannian case of Cordero-Erausquin, McCann, Schmuckenschläger [9] for barycenters between two measures to the multi-marginal setting. Our work also extends these results to the case where Ω is not finitely supported. As applications, we prove versions of Jensen's inequality on Wasserstein space and a generalized Brunn-Minkowski inequality for a random measurable set on a Riemannian manifold.

We develop a general condition on the cost function which is sufficient to imply a Monge solution and uniqueness results in the multi-marginal optimal transport problem. This result unifies and generalizes several results in the rather fragmented literature on multi-marginal problems. We also provide a systematic way to generate new examples from existing ones.