Steering Noncooperative Games Through Conjecture Design

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Morri, Francesco, Cadre, Hélène Le, Salas, David, Aussel, Didier
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Morri, Francesco
Cadre, Hélène Le
Salas, David
Aussel, Didier
author_facet Morri, Francesco
Cadre, Hélène Le
Salas, David
Aussel, Didier
contents In dynamic noncooperative games, each player makes conjectures about other players' reactions before choosing a strategy. However, resulting equilibria may be multiple and do not always lead to desirable outcomes. These issues are typically addressed separately, for example, through opponent modelling and incentive design. Drawing inspiration from conjectural variations games, we propose an incentive design framework in which a coordinator first computes an equilibrium by optimizing a predefined objective function, then communicates this equilibrium as a target for the players to reach. In a centralized setting, the coordinator also optimizes the conjectures to steer the players towards the target. In decentralized settings, players independently compute conjectures and update their strategies based on individual targets. We provide a guarantee of equilibrium existence in both cases. This framework uses conjectures not only to guide the system towards desirable outcomes but also to decouple the game into independent optimization problems, enabling efficient computation and parallelization in large-scale settings. We illustrate our theoretical results on classical representative noncooperative games, demonstrating its application potential.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09435
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Steering Noncooperative Games Through Conjecture Design
Morri, Francesco
Cadre, Hélène Le
Salas, David
Aussel, Didier
Computer Science and Game Theory
Multiagent Systems
In dynamic noncooperative games, each player makes conjectures about other players' reactions before choosing a strategy. However, resulting equilibria may be multiple and do not always lead to desirable outcomes. These issues are typically addressed separately, for example, through opponent modelling and incentive design. Drawing inspiration from conjectural variations games, we propose an incentive design framework in which a coordinator first computes an equilibrium by optimizing a predefined objective function, then communicates this equilibrium as a target for the players to reach. In a centralized setting, the coordinator also optimizes the conjectures to steer the players towards the target. In decentralized settings, players independently compute conjectures and update their strategies based on individual targets. We provide a guarantee of equilibrium existence in both cases. This framework uses conjectures not only to guide the system towards desirable outcomes but also to decouple the game into independent optimization problems, enabling efficient computation and parallelization in large-scale settings. We illustrate our theoretical results on classical representative noncooperative games, demonstrating its application potential.
title Steering Noncooperative Games Through Conjecture Design
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09435