Chapter

STACS 2006

Volume 3884 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science pp 349-360

Convergence and Approximation in Potential Games

  • George ChristodoulouAffiliated withDept. of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
  • , Vahab S. MirrokniAffiliated withMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
  • , Anastasios SidiropoulosAffiliated withMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

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Abstract

We study the speed of convergence to approximately optimal states in two classes of potential games. We provide bounds in terms of the number of rounds, where a round consists of a sequence of movements, with each player appearing at least once in each round. We model the sequential interaction between players by a best-response walk in the state graph, where every transition in the walk corresponds to a best response of a player. Our goal is to bound the social value of the states at the end of such walks. In this paper, we focus on two classes of potential games: selfish routing games, and cut games (or party affiliation games [7]).