No Arabic abstract
Weakly acyclic games form a natural generalization of the class of games that have the finite improvement property (FIP). In such games one stipulates that from any initial joint strategy some finite improvement path exists. We classify weakly acyclic games using the concept of a scheduler introduced in arXiv:1202.2209. We also show that finite games that can be solved by the iterated elimination of never best response strategies are weakly acyclic. Finally, we explain how the schedulers allow us to improve the bounds on finding a Nash equilibrium in a weakly acyclic game.
In this paper we introduce a novel flow representation for finite games in strategic form. This representation allows us to develop a canonical direct sum decomposition of an arbitrary game into three components, which we refer to as the potential, harmonic and nonstrategic components. We analyze natural classes of games that are induced by this decomposition, and in particular, focus on games with no harmonic component and games with no potential component. We show that the first class corresponds to the well-known potential games. We refer to the second class of games as harmonic games, and study the structural and equilibrium properties of this new class of games. Intuitively, the potential component of a game captures interactions that can equivalently be represented as a common interest game, while the harmonic part represents the conflicts between the interests of the players. We make this intuition precise, by studying the properties of these two classes, and show that indeed they have quite distinct and remarkable characteristics. For instance, while finite potential games always have pure Nash equilibria, harmonic games generically never do. Moreover, we show that the nonstrategic component does not affect the equilibria of a game, but plays a fundamental role in their efficiency properties, thus decoupling the location of equilibria and their payoff-related properties. Exploiting the properties of the decomposition framework, we obtain explicit expressions for the projections of games onto the subspaces of potential and harmonic games. This enables an extension of the properties of potential and harmonic games to nearby games. We exemplify this point by showing that the set of approximate equilibria of an arbitrary game can be characterized through the equilibria of its projection onto the set of potential games.
Two intimately related new classes of games are introduced and studied: entropy games (EGs) and matrix multiplication games (MMGs). An EG is played on a finite arena by two-and-a-half players: Despot, Tribune and the non-deterministic People. Despot wants to make the set of possible Peoples behaviors as small as possible, while Tribune wants to make it as large as possible.An MMG is played by two players that alternately write matrices from some predefined finite sets. One wants to maximize the growth rate of the product, and the other to minimize it. We show that in general MMGs are undecidable in quite a strong sense.On the positive side, EGs correspond to a subclass of MMGs, and we prove that such MMGs and EGs are determined, and that the optimal strategies are simple. The complexity of solving such games is in NP&coNP.
Extensive-form games constitute the standard representation scheme for games with a temporal component. But do all extensive-form games correspond to protocols that we can implement in the real world? We often rule out games with imperfect recall, which prescribe that an agent forget something that she knew before. In this paper, we show that even some games with perfect recall can be problematic to implement. Specifically, we show that if the agents have a sense of time passing (say, access to a clock), then some extensive-form games can no longer be implemented; no matter how we attempt to time the game, some information will leak to the agents that they are not supposed to have. We say such a game is not exactly timeable. We provide easy-to-check necessary and sufficient conditions for a game to be exactly timeable. Most of the technical depth of the paper concerns how to approximately time games, which we show can always be done, though it may require large amounts of time. Specifically, we show that for some games the time required to approximately implement the game grows as a power tower of height proportional to the number of players and with a parameter that measures the precision of the approximation at the top of the power tower. In practice, that makes the games untimeable. Besides the conceptual contribution to game theory, we believe our methodology can have applications to preventing information leakage in security protocols.
This paper presents a new partial two-player game, called the emph{cannibal animal game}, which is a variant of Tic-Tac-Toe. The game is played on the infinite grid, where in each round a player chooses and occupies free cells. The first player Alice can occupy a cell in each turn and wins if she occupies a set of cells, the union of a subset of which is a translated, reflected and/or rotated copy of a previously agreed upon polyomino $P$ (called an emph{animal}). The objective of the second player Bob is to prevent Alice from creating her animal by occupying in each round a translated, reflected and/or rotated copy of $P$. An animal is a emph{cannibal} if Bob has a winning strategy, and a emph{non-cannibal} otherwise. This paper presents some new tools, such as the emph{bounding strategy} and the emph{punching lemma}, to classify animals into cannibals or non-cannibals. We also show that the emph{pairing strategy} works for this problem.
Understanding the strategic behavior of miners in a blockchain is of great importance for its proper operation. A common model for mining games considers an infinite time horizon, with players optimizing asymptotic average objectives. Implicitly, this assumes that the asymptotic behaviors are realized at human-scale times, otherwise invalidating current models. We study the mining game utilizing Markov Decision Processes. Our approach allows us to describe the asymptotic behavior of the game in terms of the stationary distribution of the induced Markov chain. We focus on a model with two players under immediate release, assuming two different objectives: the (asymptotic) average reward per turn and the (asymptotic) percentage of obtained blocks. Using tools from Markov chain analysis, we show the existence of a strategy achieving slow mixing times, exponential in the policy parameters. This result emphasizes the imperative need to understand convergence rates in mining games, validating the standard models. Towards this end, we provide upper bounds for the mixing time of certain meaningful classes of strategies. This result yields criteria for establishing that long-term averaged functions are coherent as payoff functions. Moreover, by studying hitting times, we provide a criterion to validate the common simplification of considering finite states models. For both considered objectives functions, we provide explicit formulae depending on the stationary distribution of the underlying Markov chain. In particular, this shows that both mentioned objectives are not equivalent. Finally, we perform a market share case study in a particular regime of the game. More precisely, we show that an strategic player with a sufficiently large processing power can impose negative revenue on honest players.