Stake-governed tug-of-war and the biased infinity Laplacian

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Fu, Yujie, Hammond, Alan, Pete, Gábor
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
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author Fu, Yujie
Hammond, Alan
Pete, Gábor
author_facet Fu, Yujie
Hammond, Alan
Pete, Gábor
contents In tug-of-war, two players compete by moving a counter along edges of a graph, each winning the right to move at a given turn according to the flip of a possibly biased coin. The game ends when the counter reaches the boundary, a fixed subset of the vertices, at which point one player pays the other an amount determined by the boundary vertex. Economists and mathematicians have independently studied tug-of-war for many years, focussing respectively on resource-allocation forms of the game, in which players iteratively spend precious budgets in an effort to influence the bias of the coins that determine the turn victors; and on PDE arising in fine mesh limits of the constant-bias game in a Euclidean setting. In this article, we offer a mathematical treatment of a class of tug-of-war games with allocated budgets: each player is initially given a fixed budget which she draws on throughout the game to offer a stake at the start of each turn, and her probability of winning the turn is the ratio of her stake and the sum of the two stakes. We consider the game played on a tree, with boundary being the set of leaves, and the payment function being the indicator of a single distinguished leaf. We find the game value and the essentially unique Nash equilibrium of a leisurely version of the game, in which the move at any given turn is cancelled with constant probability after stakes have been placed. We show that the ratio of the players' remaining budgets is maintained at its initial value $λ$; game value is a biased infinity harmonic function; and the proportion of remaining budget that players stake at a given turn is given in terms of the spatial gradient and the $λ$-derivative of game value. We also indicate examples in which the solution takes a different form in the non-leisurely game.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2206_08300
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Stake-governed tug-of-war and the biased infinity Laplacian
Fu, Yujie
Hammond, Alan
Pete, Gábor
Probability
Computer Science and Game Theory
Theoretical Economics
Combinatorics
In tug-of-war, two players compete by moving a counter along edges of a graph, each winning the right to move at a given turn according to the flip of a possibly biased coin. The game ends when the counter reaches the boundary, a fixed subset of the vertices, at which point one player pays the other an amount determined by the boundary vertex. Economists and mathematicians have independently studied tug-of-war for many years, focussing respectively on resource-allocation forms of the game, in which players iteratively spend precious budgets in an effort to influence the bias of the coins that determine the turn victors; and on PDE arising in fine mesh limits of the constant-bias game in a Euclidean setting. In this article, we offer a mathematical treatment of a class of tug-of-war games with allocated budgets: each player is initially given a fixed budget which she draws on throughout the game to offer a stake at the start of each turn, and her probability of winning the turn is the ratio of her stake and the sum of the two stakes. We consider the game played on a tree, with boundary being the set of leaves, and the payment function being the indicator of a single distinguished leaf. We find the game value and the essentially unique Nash equilibrium of a leisurely version of the game, in which the move at any given turn is cancelled with constant probability after stakes have been placed. We show that the ratio of the players' remaining budgets is maintained at its initial value $λ$; game value is a biased infinity harmonic function; and the proportion of remaining budget that players stake at a given turn is given in terms of the spatial gradient and the $λ$-derivative of game value. We also indicate examples in which the solution takes a different form in the non-leisurely game.
title Stake-governed tug-of-war and the biased infinity Laplacian
topic Probability
Computer Science and Game Theory
Theoretical Economics
Combinatorics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.08300