Robust Mean-Field Games with Risk Aversion and Bounded Rationality

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Jeloka, Bhavini, Guan, Yue, Tsiotras, Panagiotis
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Jeloka, Bhavini
Guan, Yue
Tsiotras, Panagiotis
author_facet Jeloka, Bhavini
Guan, Yue
Tsiotras, Panagiotis
contents Recent advances in mean-field game literature enable the reduction of large-scale multi-agent problems to tractable interactions between a representative agent and a population distribution. However, existing approaches typically assume a fixed initial population distribution and fully rational agents, limiting robustness under distributional uncertainty and cognitive constraints. We address these limitations by introducing risk aversion with respect to the initial population distribution and by incorporating bounded rationality to model deviations from fully rational decision-making agents. The combination of these two elements yields a new and more general equilibrium concept, which we term the mean-field risk-averse quantal response equilibrium (MF-RQE). We establish existence results and prove convergence of fixed-point iteration and fictitious play to MF-RQE. Building on these insights, we develop a scalable reinforcement learning algorithm for scenarios with large state-action spaces. Numerical experiments demonstrate that MF-RQE policies achieve improved robustness relative to classical mean-field approaches that optimize expected cumulative rewards under a fixed initial distribution and are restricted to entropy-based regularizers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_13353
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robust Mean-Field Games with Risk Aversion and Bounded Rationality
Jeloka, Bhavini
Guan, Yue
Tsiotras, Panagiotis
Multiagent Systems
Computer Science and Game Theory
Recent advances in mean-field game literature enable the reduction of large-scale multi-agent problems to tractable interactions between a representative agent and a population distribution. However, existing approaches typically assume a fixed initial population distribution and fully rational agents, limiting robustness under distributional uncertainty and cognitive constraints. We address these limitations by introducing risk aversion with respect to the initial population distribution and by incorporating bounded rationality to model deviations from fully rational decision-making agents. The combination of these two elements yields a new and more general equilibrium concept, which we term the mean-field risk-averse quantal response equilibrium (MF-RQE). We establish existence results and prove convergence of fixed-point iteration and fictitious play to MF-RQE. Building on these insights, we develop a scalable reinforcement learning algorithm for scenarios with large state-action spaces. Numerical experiments demonstrate that MF-RQE policies achieve improved robustness relative to classical mean-field approaches that optimize expected cumulative rewards under a fixed initial distribution and are restricted to entropy-based regularizers.
title Robust Mean-Field Games with Risk Aversion and Bounded Rationality
topic Multiagent Systems
Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13353