On Existence of Nash Equilibria of Games with Constraints on Multistrategies

Abstract

In this paper, sufficient conditions are given, which are less restrictivethan those required by the Arrow–Debreu–Nash theorem, on theexistence of a Nash equilibrium of an n-player game {₁, . . . , Y_n,f₁, . . . , f_n} in normal form with a nonempty closedconvex constraint C on the set Y=Πi Y_i of multistrategies. Theith player has to minimize the function fi with respect to the ithvariable. We consider two cases.

In the first case, Y is a real Hilbert space and the loss function class isquadratic. In this case, the existence of a Nash equilibrium is guaranteedas a simple consequence of the projection theorem for Hilbert spaces. In thesecond case, Y is a Euclidean space, the loss functions are continuous, andf_i is convex with respect to the ith variable. In this case, the techniqueis quite particular, because the constrained game is approximated with asequence of free games, each with a Nash equilibrium in an appropriatecompact space X. Since X is compact, there exists a subsequence of theseNash equilibrium points which is convergent in the norm. If thelimit point is in C and if the order of convergence is greater than one,then this is a Nash equilibrium of the constrained game.