Insights into capacity constrained optimal transport

Abstract

A variant of the classical optimal transportation problem is: among all joint measures with fixed marginals and which are dominated by a given density, find the optimal one. Existence and uniqueness of solutions to this variant were established in \cite{KM11}. In the present manuscript, we expose an unexpected symmetry leading to the first explicit examples in two and more dimensions. These are inspired in part by simulations in one dimension which display singularities and topology and in part by two further developments: the identification of all extreme points in the feasible set, and a new approach to uniqueness based on constructing feasible perturbations.