Last-Iterate Convergence of No-Regret Learning for Equilibria in Bargaining Games

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kamp, Serafina, Liebman, Reese, Fish, Benjamin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kamp, Serafina
Liebman, Reese
Fish, Benjamin
author_facet Kamp, Serafina
Liebman, Reese
Fish, Benjamin
contents Bargaining games, where agents attempt to agree on how to split utility, are an important class of games used to study economic behavior, which motivates a study of online learning algorithms in these games. In this work, we tackle when no-regret learning algorithms converge to Nash equilibria in bargaining games. Recent results have shown that online algorithms related to Follow the Regularized Leader (FTRL) converge to Nash equilibria (NE) in the last iterate in a wide variety of games, including zero-sum games. However, bargaining games do not have the properties used previously to established convergence guarantees, even in the simplest case of the ultimatum game, which features a single take-it-or-leave-it offer. Nonetheless, we establish that FTRL (without the modifications necessary for zero-sum games) achieves last-iterate convergence to an approximate NE in the ultimatum game along with a bound on convergence time under mild assumptions. Further, we provide experimental results to demonstrate that convergence to NE, including NE with asymmetric payoffs, occurs under a broad range of initial conditions, both in the ultimatum game and in bargaining games with multiple rounds. This work demonstrates how complex economic behavior (e.g. learning to use threats and the existence of many possible equilibrium outcomes) can result from using a simple learning algorithm, and that FTRL can converge to equilibria in a more diverse set of games than previously known.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_03150
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Last-Iterate Convergence of No-Regret Learning for Equilibria in Bargaining Games
Kamp, Serafina
Liebman, Reese
Fish, Benjamin
Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
Bargaining games, where agents attempt to agree on how to split utility, are an important class of games used to study economic behavior, which motivates a study of online learning algorithms in these games. In this work, we tackle when no-regret learning algorithms converge to Nash equilibria in bargaining games. Recent results have shown that online algorithms related to Follow the Regularized Leader (FTRL) converge to Nash equilibria (NE) in the last iterate in a wide variety of games, including zero-sum games. However, bargaining games do not have the properties used previously to established convergence guarantees, even in the simplest case of the ultimatum game, which features a single take-it-or-leave-it offer. Nonetheless, we establish that FTRL (without the modifications necessary for zero-sum games) achieves last-iterate convergence to an approximate NE in the ultimatum game along with a bound on convergence time under mild assumptions. Further, we provide experimental results to demonstrate that convergence to NE, including NE with asymmetric payoffs, occurs under a broad range of initial conditions, both in the ultimatum game and in bargaining games with multiple rounds. This work demonstrates how complex economic behavior (e.g. learning to use threats and the existence of many possible equilibrium outcomes) can result from using a simple learning algorithm, and that FTRL can converge to equilibria in a more diverse set of games than previously known.
title Last-Iterate Convergence of No-Regret Learning for Equilibria in Bargaining Games
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.03150