The computational complexity of nash equilibria in concisely represented games

Grant Schoenebeck, Salil Vadhan
2006 Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Electronic commerce - EC '06  
Games may be represented in many different ways, and different representations of games affect the complexity of problems associated with games, such as finding a Nash equilibrium. The traditional method of representing a game is to explicitly list all the payoffs, but this incurs an exponential blowup as the number of agents grows. We study two models of concisely represented games: circuit games, where the payoffs are computed by a given boolean circuit, and graph games, where each agent's
more » ... off is a function of only the strategies played by its neighbors in a given graph. For these two models, we study the complexity of four questions: determining if a given strategy is a Nash equilibrium, finding a Nash equilibrium, determining if there exists a pure Nash equilibrium, and determining if there exists a Nash equilibrium in which the payoffs to a player meet some given guarantees. In many cases, we obtain tight results, showing that the problems are complete for various complexity classes.
doi:10.1145/1134707.1134737 dblp:conf/sigecom/SchoenebeckV06 fatcat:lzin6ftnivfalfafketbzmm6ai