Optimal transport with Coulomb cost. Approximation and duality^{∗,∗∗,∗∗∗}

Dipartimento di Matematica, Università di Pisa, Largo Bruno Pontecorvo 5, 56127 Pisa, Italy.
luigi.de.pascale@unipi.it

Received: 23 March 2015

Abstract

We revisit the duality theorem for multimarginal optimal transportation problems. In particular, we focus on the Coulomb cost. We use a discrete approximation to prove equality of the extremal values and some careful estimates of the approximating sequence to prove existence of maximizers for the dual problem (Kantorovich’s potentials). Finally we observe that the same strategy can be applied to a more general class of costs and that a classical results on the topic cannot be applied here.