Inverse Game Theory: Learning Utilities in Succinct Games

Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 9470)

Abstract

One of the central questions in game theory deals with predicting the behavior of an agent. Here, we study the inverse of this problem: given the agents’ equilibrium behavior, what are possible utilities that motivate this behavior? We consider this problem in arbitrary normal-form games in which the utilities can be represented by a small number of parameters, such as in graphical, congestion, and network design games. In all such settings, we show how to efficiently, i.e. in polynomial time, determine utilities consistent with a given correlated equilibrium. However, inferring both utilities and structural elements (e.g., the graph within a graphical game) is in general NP-hard. From a theoretical perspective our results show that rationalizing an equilibrium is computationally easier than computing it; from a practical perspective a practitioner can use our algorithms to validate behavioral models.

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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Open Access This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Stanford UniversityStanfordUSA

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