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Nash Equilibria in Perturbation Resilient Games

Maria-Florina Balcan,M. Braverman

Published 2010 in arXiv: Computer Science and Game Theory

ABSTRACT

Motivated by the fact that in many game-theoretic settings, the game analyzed is only an approximation to the game being played, in this work we analyze equilibrium computation for the broad and natural class of bimatrix games that are stable to perturbations. We specifically focus on games with the property that small changes in the payoff matrices do not cause the Nash equilibria of the game to fluctuate wildly. For such games we show how one can compute approximate Nash equilibria more efficiently than the general result of Lipton et al. \cite{LMM03}, by an amount that depends on the degree of stability of the game and that reduces to their bound in the worst case. Furthermore, we show that for stable games the approximate equilibria found will be close in variation distance to true equilibria, and moreover this holds even if we are given as input only a perturbation of the actual underlying stable game. For uniformly-stable games, where the equilibria fluctuate at most quasi-linearly in the extent of the perturbation, we get a particularly dramatic improvement. Here, we achieve a fully quasi-polynomial-time approximation scheme: that is, we can find $1/\poly(n)$-approximate equilibria in quasi-polynomial time. This is in marked contrast to the general class of bimatrix games for which finding such approximate equilibria is PPAD-hard. In particular, under the (widely believed) assumption that PPAD is not contained in quasi-polynomial time, our results imply that such uniformly stable games are inherently easier for computation of approximate equilibria than general bimatrix games.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2010

  • Venue

    arXiv: Computer Science and Game Theory

  • Publication date

    2010-08-10

  • Fields of study

    Mathematics, Computer Science

  • Identifiers
    arXiv 1008.1827
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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