Abstract
The class of weakly acyclic games, which includes potential games and dominance-solvable games, captures many practical application domains. Informally, a weakly acyclic game is one where natural distributed dynamics, such as better-response dynamics, cannot enter inescapable oscillations. We establish a novel link between such games and the existence of pure Nash equilibria in subgames. Specifically, we show that the existence of a unique pure Nash equilibrium in every subgame implies the weak acyclicity of a game. In contrast, the possible existence of multiple pure Nash equilibria in every subgame is insufficient for weak acyclicity.
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Fabrikant, A., Jaggard, A.D., Schapira, M. (2010). On the Structure of Weakly Acyclic Games. In: Kontogiannis, S., Koutsoupias, E., Spirakis, P.G. (eds) Algorithmic Game Theory. SAGT 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6386. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16170-4_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16170-4_12
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