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Nash Equilibria, the Price of Anarchy and the Fully Mixed Nash Equilibrium Conjecture

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Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP 2005)

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Abstract

Motivation-Framework. Apparently, it is in human’s nature to act selfishly. Game Theory, founded by von Neumann and Morgenstern [39, 40], provides us with strategic games, an important mathematical model to describe and analyze such a selfish behavior and its resulting conflicts. In a strategic game, each of a finite set of players aims for an optimal value of its private objective function by choosing either a pure strategy (a single strategy) or a mixed strategy (a probability distribution over all pure strategies) from its strategy set. Strategic games in which the strategy sets are finite are called finite strategic games. Each player chooses its strategy once and for all, and all players’ choices are made non-cooperatively and simultaneously (that is, when choosing a strategy each player is not informed of the strategies chosen by any other player). One of the basic assumption in strategic games is that the players act rational, that is, consistently in pursuit of their private objective function. For a concise introduction to contemporary Game Theory we recommend [25].

This work has been partially supported by the DFG-SFB 376 and by the European Union within the 6th Framework Programme under contract 001907 (DELIS).

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Gairing, M., Lücking, T., Monien, B., Tiemann, K. (2005). Nash Equilibria, the Price of Anarchy and the Fully Mixed Nash Equilibrium Conjecture. In: Caires, L., Italiano, G.F., Monteiro, L., Palamidessi, C., Yung, M. (eds) Automata, Languages and Programming. ICALP 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3580. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11523468_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11523468_5

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