Regularity and long time behavior of one-dimensional first-order mean field games and the planning problem

We study the regularity and long time behavior of the one-dimensional, local, first order mean field games system and the planning problem, assuming a Hamiltonian of superlinear growth, with a nonseparated, strictly monotone dependence on the density. We improve upon the existing literature by obtaining two regularity results. The first is the existence of classical solutions without the need to assume blow-up of the cost function near small densities. The second result is the interior smoothness of weak solutions without the need to assume either blow-up of the cost function or that the initial density be bounded away from zero. We also characterize the long time behavior of the solutions, proving that they satisfy the turnpike property with an exponential rate of convergence and identifying their limit as the solution of the infinite horizon system. Our approach relies on the elliptic structure of the system and displacement convexity estimates. In particular, we apply displacement convexity methods to obtain both global and local a priori lower bounds on the density.