We introduce a notion of barycenter of a probability measure related to the symmetric mean of a collection of non-negative real numbers. Our definition is inspired by the work of Halász and Székely, who in 1976 proved a law of large numbers for symmetric means. We study the analytic properties of this Halász–Székely barycenter. We establish fundamental inequalities that relate the symmetric mean of a list of non-negative real numbers with the barycenter of the measure uniformly supported on these points. As consequence, we go on to establish an ergodic theorem stating that the symmetric means of a sequence of dynamical observations converge to the Halász–Székely barycenter of the corresponding distribution.

Let $(G,+)$ be a compact, abelian, and metrizable topological group. In this group we take $g\in G$ such that the corresponding automorphism $\tau _g$ is ergodic. The main result of this paper is a new ergodic theorem for functions in $L^1(G,M)$ , where M is a Hadamard space. The novelty of our result is that we use inductive means to average the elements of the orbit $\{\tau _g^n(h)\}_{n\in \mathbb {N}}$ . The advantage of inductive means is that they can be explicitly computed in many important examples. The proof of the ergodic theorem is done firstly for continuous functions, and then it is extended to $L^1$ functions. The extension is based on a new construction of mollifiers in Hadamard spaces. This construction has the advantage that it only uses the metric structure and the existence of barycenters, and does not require the existence of an underlying vector space. For this reason, it can be used in any Hadamard space, in contrast to those results that need to use the tangent space or some chart to define the mollifier.

In this paper, we establish a Kantorovich duality for unbalanced optimal total variation transport problems. As consequences, we recover a version of duality formula for partial optimal transports established by Caffarelli and McCann; and we also get another proof of Kantorovich–Rubinstein theorem for generalized Wasserstein distance $\widetilde {W}_1^{a,b}$ proved before by Piccoli and Rossi. Then we apply our duality formula to study generalized Wasserstein barycenters. We show the existence of these barycenters for measures with compact supports. Finally, we prove the consistency of our barycenters.