We study strong equilibria in network creation games. These form a classical and well-studied class of games where a set of players form a network by buying edges to their neighbors at a cost of a fixed parameter $α$. The cost of a player is defined to be the cost of the bought edges plus the sum of distances to all the players in the resulting graph.
We identify and characterize various structural properties of strong equilibria, which lead to a characterization of the set of strong equilibria for all $α$ in the range $(0,2)$. For $α> 2$, Andelman et al. (2009) prove that a star graph in which every leaf buys one edge to the center node is a strong equilibrium, and conjecture that in fact any star is a strong equilibrium. We resolve this conjecture in the affirmative. Additionally, we show that when $α$ is large enough ($\geq 2n$) there exist non-star trees that are strong equilibria. For the strong price of anarchy, we provide precise expressions when $α$ is in the range $(0,2)$, and we prove a lower bound of $3/2$ when $α\geq 2$.
Lastly, we aim to characterize under which conditions (coalitional) improvement dynamics may converge to a strong equilibrium. To this end, we study the (coalitional) finite improvement property and (coalitional) weak acyclicity property. We prove various conditions under which these properties do and do not hold. Some of these results also hold for the class of pure Nash equilibria.
We prove that differential Nash equilibria are generic amongst local Nash equilibria in continuous zero-sum games. That is, there exists an open-dense subset of zero-sum games for which local Nash equilibria are non-degenerate differential Nash equilibria. The result extends previous results to the zero-sum setting, where we obtain even stronger results; in particular, we show that local Nash equilibria are generically hyperbolic critical points. We further show that differential Nash equilibria of zero-sum games are structurally stable. The purpose for presenting these extensions is the recen…
The problem of the existence of Berge equilibria in the sense of Zhukovskii in normal form finite games in pure and in mixed strategies is studied. The example of a three-player game that has Berge equilibrium neither in pure nor in mixed strategies is given.
We study multiplayer reachability games played on a finite directed graph equipped with target sets, one for each player. In those reachability games, it is known that there always exists a Nash equilibrium (NE) and a subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE). But sometimes several equilibria may coexist such that in one equilibrium no player reaches his target set whereas in another one several players reach it. It is thus very natural to identify "relevant" equilibria. In this paper, we consider different notions of relevant equilibria including Pareto optimal equilibria and equilibria with high soc…
We tackle a fundamental problem in empirical game-theoretic analysis (EGTA), that of learning equilibria of simulation-based games. Such games cannot be described in analytical form; instead, a black-box simulator can be queried to obtain noisy samples of utilities. Our approach to EGTA is in the spirit of probably approximately correct learning. We design algorithms that learn so-called empirical games, which uniformly approximate the utilities of simulation-based games with finite-sample guarantees. These algorithms can be instantiated with various concentration inequalities. Building on ear…
We study pure Nash equilibria in infinite-duration games on graphs, with partial visibility of actions but communication (based on a graph) among the players. We show that a simple communication mechanism consisting in reporting the deviator when seeing it and propagating this information is sufficient for characterizing Nash equilibria. We propose an epistemic game construction, which conveniently records important information about the knowledge of the players. With this abstraction, we are able to characterize Nash equilibria which follow the simple communication pattern via winning strateg…
We study the Nash equilibrium and the price of anarchy in the max-distance network creation game. Network creation game, first introduced and studied by Fabrikant et al., is a classic model for real-world networks from a game-theoretic point of view. In a network creation game with n selfish vertex agents, each vertex can build undirected edges incident to a subset of the other vertices. The goal of every agent is to minimize its creation cost plus its usage cost, where the creation cost is the unit edge cost $α$ times the number of edges it builds, and the usage cost is the sum of distances t…
We study multiplayer turn-based timed games with reachability objectives. In particular, we are interested in the notion of subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE). We prove that deciding the constrained existence of an SPE in this setting is EXPTIME-complete.
In this paper, we consider the problem of wireless power control in an interference channel where transmitters aim to maximize their own benefit. When the individual payoff or utility function is derived from the transmission efficiency and the spent power, previous works typically study the Nash equilibrium of the resulting power control game. We propose to introduce concepts of correlated and communication equilibria from game theory to find efficient solutions (compared to the Nash equilibrium) for this problem. Communication and correlated equilibria are analyzed for the power control game…
The Colonel Blotto Problem proposed by Borel in 1921 has served as a widely applicable model of budget-constrained simultaneous winner-take-all competitions in the social sciences. Applications include elections, advertising, R&D and more. However, the classic Blotto problem and variants limit the study to competitions over a finite set of discrete battlefields. In this paper, we extend the classical theory to study multiplayer Blotto games over arbitrary measurable battlegrounds, provide an algorithm to efficiently sample equilibria of symmetric "equipartionable" Generalized Blotto games, and…
This paper is an exposition of algorithms for finding one or all equilibria of a bimatrix game (a two-player game in strategic form) in the style of a chapter in a graduate textbook. Using labeled "best-response polytopes", we present the Lemke-Howson algorithm that finds one equilibrium. We show that the path followed by this algorithm has a direction, and that the endpoints of the path have opposite index, in a canonical way using determinants. For reference, we prove that a number of notions of nondegeneracy of a bimatrix game are equivalent. The computation of all equilibria of a general b…
In recent years, empirical game-theoretic analysis (EGTA) has emerged as a powerful tool for analyzing games in which an exact specification of the utilities is unavailable. Instead, EGTA assumes access to an oracle, i.e., a simulator, which can generate unbiased noisy samples of players' unknown utilities, given a strategy profile. Utilities can thus be empirically estimated by repeatedly querying the simulator. Recently, various progressive sampling (PS) algorithms have been proposed, which aim to produce PAC-style learning guarantees (e.g., approximate Nash equilibria with high probability)…
Computing an equilibrium in congestion games can be challenging when the number of players is large. Yet, it is a problem to be addressed in practice, for instance to forecast the state of the system and be able to control it. In this work, we analyze the case of generalized atomic congestion games, with coupling constraints, and with players that are heterogeneous through their action sets and their utility functions. We obtain an approximation of the variational Nash equilibria---a notion generalizing Nash equilibria in the presence of coupling constraints---of a large atomic congestion game…
Nearly a decade ago, Azrieli and Shmaya introduced the class of $λ$-Lipschitz games in which every player's payoff function is $λ$-Lipschitz with respect to the actions of the other players. They showed that such games admit $ε$-approximate pure Nash equilibria for certain settings of $ε$ and $λ$. They left open, however, the question of how hard it is to find such an equilibrium. In this work, we develop a query-efficient reduction from more general games to Lipschitz games. We use this reduction to show a query lower bound for any randomized algorithm finding $ε$-approximate pure Nash equili…
Public goods games study the incentives of individuals to contribute to a public good and their behaviors in equilibria. In this paper, we examine a specific type of public goods game where players are networked and each has binary actions, and focus on the algorithmic aspects of such games. First, we show that checking the existence of a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium is NP-complete. We then identify tractable instances based on restrictions of either utility functions or of the underlying graphical structure. In certain cases, we also show that we can efficiently compute a socially optimal N…
We study the computational complexity of finding Stackelberg Equilibria in general-sum games, where the set of pure strategies of the leader and the followers are exponentially large in a natrual representation of the problem. In \emph{zero-sum} games, the notion of a Stackelberg equilibrium coincides with the notion of a \emph{Nash Equilibrium}~\cite{korzhyk2011stackelberg}. Finding these equilibrium concepts in zero-sum games can be efficiently done when the players have polynomially many pure strategies or when (in additional to some structural properties) a best-response oracle is availabl…
Aggregative games have many industrial applications, and computing an equilibrium in those games is challenging when the number of players is large. In the framework of atomic aggregative games with coupling constraints, we show that variational Nash equilibria of a large aggregative game can be approximated by a Wardrop equilibrium of an auxiliary population game of smaller dimension. Each population of this auxiliary game corresponds to a group of atomic players of the initial large game. This approach enables an efficient computation of an approximated equilibrium, as the variational inequa…
In the Colonel Blotto game, two players with a fixed budget simultaneously allocate their resources across n battlefields to maximize the aggregate value gained from the battlefields where they have the higher allocation. Despite its long-standing history and important applications, the Colonel Blotto game still lacks a complete Nash equilibrium characterization in its most general form where players are asymmetric and battlefields' values are heterogeneous across battlefields and different between the two players---this is called the Generalized Colonel Blotto game. In this work, we propose a…
We study the complexity of computing a uniform Nash equilibrium on a non-win-lose bimatrix game. It is known that such a problem is NP-complete even if a bimatrix game is win-lose (Bonifaci et al., 2008). Fortunately, if a win-lose bimatrix game is planar, then uniform Nash equilibria always exist. We have a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a uniform Nash equilibrium of a planar win-lose bimatrix game (Addario-Berry et al., 2007). The following question is left: How hard to compute a uniform Nash equilibrium on a planar non-win-lose bimatrix game? This paper resolves this issue. We prove …
Games with continuous strategy sets arise in several machine learning problems (e.g. adversarial learning). For such games, simple no-regret learning algorithms exist in several cases and ensure convergence to coarse correlated equilibria (CCE). The efficiency of such equilibria with respect to a social function, however, is not well understood. In this paper, we define the class of valid utility games with continuous strategies and provide efficiency bounds for their CCEs. Our bounds rely on the social function being a monotone DR-submodular function. We further refine our bounds based on the…
We introduce Q-Nash, a quantum annealing algorithm for the NP-complete problem of Fnding pure Nash equilibria in graphical games. The algorithm consists of two phases. The first phase determines all combinations of best response strategies for each player using classical computation. The second phase finds pure Nash equilibria using a quantum annealing device by mapping the computed combinations to a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization formulation based on the Set Cover problem. We empirically evaluate Q-Nash on D-Wave's Quantum Annealer 2000Q using different graphical game topologies.…
