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Paper:

TR05-052 | 5th May 2005 00:00

The Computational Complexity of Nash Equilibria in Concisely Represented Games

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TR05-052
Authors: Grant Schoenebeck, Salil Vadhan
Publication: 5th May 2005 07:02
Downloads: 3039
Keywords: 


Abstract:

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 payoff 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.



ISSN 1433-8092 | Imprint