Applications of Optimal Transport in Economics The 1975 Nobel Prize winner in Economics was Kantorovich who reformulated the optimal transportation theory of Monge and applied it to optimal resource allocation. The Wasserstein distance is central to this optimization model.
Can anyone familiar with optimal transport give an overview of some of its applications to economics? maybe beyond just moving mass/products to separate destination points. It's hard to understand how production, consumption and pricing comes into the picture compared to non-economics optimal transport.
If they even are still in use, how have these methods been developed and improved for economists in recent publications?
Optimal transport methods are very much still in use in economics. The show up in two-sided matching with side-payments, contract theory, hedonic pricing, partial identification in econometrics, and a couple of other areas. You can find an excellent overview of economic applications in the 2016 book Optimal Transport Methods in Economics by Alfred Galichon.