Abstract | In view of the apparent intractability of constructing Nash Equilibria (NE
in short) in polynomial time, even for bimatrix games, understanding the limitations
of the approximability of the problem is an important challenge.
In this work we study the tractability of a notion of approximate equilibria in bimatrix
games, called well supported approximate Nash Equilibria (SuppNE in short).
Roughly speaking, while the typical notion of approximate NE demands that each
player gets a payoff at least an additive term less than the best possible payoff, in a
SuppNE each player is assumed to adopt with positive probability only approximate
pure best responses to the opponent¢s strategy.
As a first step, we demonstrate the existence of SuppNE with small supports and
at the same time good quality. This is a simple corollary of Althöfer¢s Approximation
Lemma, and implies a subexponential time algorithm for constructing SuppNE of
arbitrary (constant) precision.
We then propose algorithms for constructing SuppNE in win lose and normalized
bimatrix games (i.e., whose payoff matrices take values from 0, 1 and [0, 1] respectively).
Our methodology for attacking the problem is based on the solvability of zero sum bimatrix games (via its connection to linear programming) and provides a
0.5-SuppNE for win lose games and a 0.667-SuppNE for normalized games.
To our knowledge, this paper provides the first polynomial time algorithms constructing
å-SuppNE for normalized or win lose bimatrix games, for any nontrivial
constant 0 ≤å <1, bounded away from 1. |