Computing Good Nash Equilibria in Graphical Games

Details Computing Good Nash Equilibria in Graphical Games Computing Good Nash Equilibria in Graphical Games

2007-03-27

arxiv.org/abs/cs/0703133v1

Computer Science

Computer Science and Game Theory

25 pages. Short version appears in ACM EC'07

Scientific paper

This paper addresses the problem of fair equilibrium selection in graphical games. Our approach is based on the data structure called the {\em best response policy}, which was proposed by Kearns et al. \cite{kls} as a way to represent all Nash equilibria of a graphical game. In \cite{egg}, it was shown that the best response policy has polynomial size as long as the underlying graph is a path. In this paper, we show that if the underlying graph is a bounded-degree tree and the best response policy has polynomial size then there is an efficient algorithm which constructs a Nash equilibrium that guarantees certain payoffs to all participants. Another attractive solution concept is a Nash equilibrium that maximizes the social welfare. We show that, while exactly computing the latter is infeasible (we prove that solving this problem may involve algebraic numbers of an arbitrarily high degree), there exists an FPTAS for finding such an equilibrium as long as the best response policy has polynomial size. These two algorithms can be combined to produce Nash equilibria that satisfy various fairness criteria.

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