Game Dynamics and Equilibrium Computation in the Population Protocol Model

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Alistarh, Dan, Chatterjee, Krishnendu, Karrabi, Mehrdad, Lazarsfeld, John
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Alistarh, Dan
Chatterjee, Krishnendu
Karrabi, Mehrdad
Lazarsfeld, John
author_facet Alistarh, Dan
Chatterjee, Krishnendu
Karrabi, Mehrdad
Lazarsfeld, John
contents We initiate the study of game dynamics in the population protocol model: $n$ agents each maintain a current local strategy and interact in pairs uniformly at random. Upon each interaction, the agents play a two-person game and receive a payoff from an underlying utility function, and they can subsequently update their strategies according to a fixed local algorithm. In this setting, we ask how the distribution over agent strategies evolves over a sequence of interactions, and we introduce a new distributional equilibrium concept to quantify the quality of such distributions. As an initial example, we study a class of repeated prisoner's dilemma games, and we consider a family of simple local update algorithms that yield non-trivial dynamics over the distribution of agent strategies. We show that these dynamics are related to a new class of high-dimensional Ehrenfest random walks, and we derive exact characterizations of their stationary distributions, bounds on their mixing times, and prove their convergence to approximate distributional equilibria. Our results highlight trade-offs between the local state space of each agent, and the convergence rate and approximation factor of the underlying dynamics. Our approach opens the door towards the further characterization of equilibrium computation for other classes of games and dynamics in the population setting.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_07297
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Game Dynamics and Equilibrium Computation in the Population Protocol Model
Alistarh, Dan
Chatterjee, Krishnendu
Karrabi, Mehrdad
Lazarsfeld, John
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computer Science and Game Theory
We initiate the study of game dynamics in the population protocol model: $n$ agents each maintain a current local strategy and interact in pairs uniformly at random. Upon each interaction, the agents play a two-person game and receive a payoff from an underlying utility function, and they can subsequently update their strategies according to a fixed local algorithm. In this setting, we ask how the distribution over agent strategies evolves over a sequence of interactions, and we introduce a new distributional equilibrium concept to quantify the quality of such distributions. As an initial example, we study a class of repeated prisoner's dilemma games, and we consider a family of simple local update algorithms that yield non-trivial dynamics over the distribution of agent strategies. We show that these dynamics are related to a new class of high-dimensional Ehrenfest random walks, and we derive exact characterizations of their stationary distributions, bounds on their mixing times, and prove their convergence to approximate distributional equilibria. Our results highlight trade-offs between the local state space of each agent, and the convergence rate and approximation factor of the underlying dynamics. Our approach opens the door towards the further characterization of equilibrium computation for other classes of games and dynamics in the population setting.
title Game Dynamics and Equilibrium Computation in the Population Protocol Model
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07297