Barycenters in Disintegrated optimal transport

Abstract

We prove existence and duality on a wide class of metric spaces, and uniqueness results on any connected, complete Riemannian manifold, with or without boundary, for classical Monge--Kantorovich barycenters. In particular, this is the first and only uniqueness result with no restriction on the geometry of the manifold aside from connectedness and completeness. We obtain these via the corresponding results for barycenter problems associated to a new two-parameter family of metrics on probability measures on a general metric fiber bundle, called the $\text{disintegrated Monge–Kantorovich metrics}$ (previously introduced by the authors).

31 pages. Comments welcome! We have split our previous preprint, 2407.01879, into two parts, with this part addressing barycenter problems