Abstract
We study the problem of computing Nash equilibria in a two-player normal form (bimatrix) game from the perspective of parameterized complexity. Recent results proved hardness for a number of variants, when parameterized by the support size. We complement those results, by identifying three cases in which the problem becomes fixed-parameter tractable. Our results are based on a graph-theoretic representation of a bimatrix game, and on applying graph-theoretic tools on this representation.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Note that N[I]=N(I)∪I denotes the closed neighborhood if I.
References
Abbott, T.G., Kane, D.M., Valiant, P.: On the complexity of two-player win-lose games. In: Proc. of the 46th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations Of Computer Science (FOCS), pp. 113–122 (2005)
Addario-Berry, L., Olver, N., Vetta, A.: A polynomial time algorithm for finding Nash equilibria in planar win-lose games. J. Graph Algorithms Appl. 11(1), 309–319 (2007)
Bodlaender, H.L., Downey, R.G., Fellows, M.R., Hermelin, D.: On problems without polynomial kernels. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 75(8), 423–434 (2009)
Bosse, H., Byrka, J., Markakis, E.: New algorithms for approximate Nash equilibria in bimatrix games. Theor. Comput. Sci. 411(1), 164–173 (2010)
Chen, X., Deng, X.: 3-NASH is PPAD-complete. Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (134) (2005)
Chen, J., Chor, B., Fellows, M., Huang, X., Juedes, D., Kanj, I.A., Xia, G.: Tight lower bounds for certain parameterized NP-hard problems. Inf. Comput. 201(2), 216–231 (2005)
Chen, X., Deng, X., Teng, S.-H.: Sparse games are hard. In: Proc. of the 2nd International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE), pp. 262–273 (2006)
Chen, X., Teng, S.-H., Valiant, P.: The approximation complexity of win-lose games. In: Proc. of the 18th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), pp. 159–168 (2007)
Chen, X., Deng, X., Teng, S.-H.: Settling the complexity of computing two-player Nash equilibria. J. ACM 56(3), 1–57 (2009)
Codenotti, B., Leoncini, M., Resta, G.: Efficient computation of Nash equilibria for very sparse win-lose bimatrix games. In: Proc. of the 14th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), pp. 232–243 (2006)
Daskalakis, C., Papadimitriou, C.H.: Three-player games are hard. Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity (139) (2005)
Daskalakis, C., Papadimitriou, C.H.: On oblivious PTAS’s for Nash equilibrium. In: Proc. of the 41st Annual ACM Symposium on Theory Of Computing (STOC), pp. 75–84 (2009)
Daskalakis, C., Mehta, A., Papadimitriou, C.H.: Progress in approximate Nash equilibria. In: Proc. of the 8th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC), pp. 355–358 (2007)
Daskalakis, C., Goldberg, P.W., Papadimitriou, C.H.: The complexity of computing a Nash equilibrium. Commun. ACM 52(2), 89–97 (2009)
Daskalakis, C., Mehta, A., Papadimitriou, C.H.: A note on approximate Nash equilibria. Theor. Comput. Sci. 410(17), 1581–1588 (2009)
Downey, R.G., Fellows, M.R.: Parameterized Complexity. Springer, Berlin (1999)
Eppstein, D.: Subgraph isomorphism in planar graphs and related problems. J. Graph Algorithms Appl. 3(3), 1–27 (1999)
Estivill-Castro, V., Parsa, M.: Computing Nash equilibria gets harder: New results show hardness even for parameterized complexity. In: Proc. of the 15th Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium (CATS), vol. 94, pp. 81–87 (2009)
Estivill-Castro, V., Parsa, M.: Single parameter fpt-algorithms for non-trivial games. In: Proc. of the 21st International Workshop On Combinatorial Algorithms (IWOCA), pp. 121–124 (2010)
Flum, J., Grohe, M.: Parameterized Complexity Theory. Springer, Berlin (2006)
Fortnow, L., Santhanam, R.: Infeasibility of instance compression and succinct PCPs for NP. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 77(1), 91–106 (2011)
Gilboa, I., Zemel, E.: Nash and correlated equilibria: Some complexity considerations. Games Econ. Behav. 1(1), 80–93 (1989)
Goldberg, P.W., Papadimitriou, C.H.: Reducibility among equilibrium problems. In: Proc. of the 38th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory Of Computing (STOC), pp. 61–70 (2006)
Kalyanaraman, S., Umans, C.: Algorithms for playing games with limited randomness. In: Proc. of the 15th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA), pp. 323–334 (2007)
Kannan, R., Theobald, T.: Games of fixed rank: a hierarchy of bimatrix games. Econ. Theory 42, 157–173 (2010)
Kontogiannis, S.C., Spirakis, P.G.: Exploiting concavity in bimatrix games: New polynomially tractable subclasses. In: Proc. of the 13th International Workshop on Algorithms and Techniques for Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization (APPROX), pp. 312–325 (2010)
Lipton, R.J., Markakis, E., Mehta, A.: Playing large games using simple strategies. In: Proc. of the 4th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC), pp. 36–41 (2003)
Nisan, N., Roughgarden, T., Tardos, É., Vazirani, V.V.: Algorithmic Game Theory. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2007)
Papadimitriou, C.H.: Algorithms, games, and the Internet. In: Proc. of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), pp. 749–753 (2001)
Tsaknakis, H., Spirakis, P.G.: An optimization approach for approximate Nash equilibria. Internet Math. 5(4), 365–382 (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
The third author acknowledges support by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), project “KERNELS: Combinatorial Analysis of Data Reduction”.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hermelin, D., Huang, CC., Kratsch, S. et al. Parameterized Two-Player Nash Equilibrium. Algorithmica 65, 802–816 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-011-9609-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-011-9609-z