Abstract
Supermodular games are a well known class of noncooperative games which find significant applications in a variety of models, especially in operations research and economic applications. Supermodular games always have Nash equilibria which are characterized as fixed points of multivalued functions on complete lattices. Abstract interpretation is here applied to set up an approximation framework for Nash equilibria of supermodular games. This is achieved by extending the theory of abstract interpretation in order to cope with approximations of multivalued functions and by providing some methods for abstracting supermodular games, thus obtaining approximate Nash equilibria which are shown to be correct within the abstract interpretation framework.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Birkhoff G (1967) Lattice theory, 3rd edn. AMS, Providence
Carl S, Heikkil S (2011) Fixed point theory in ordered sets and applications. Springer, Berlin
Cousot P, Cousot R (1977) Abstract interpretation: a unified lattice model for static analysis of programs by construction or approximation of fixed points. In: Proceedings of 4th ACM symposium on principles of programming languages (POPL’77). ACM Press, pp 238–252
Cousot P, Cousot R (1979) Systematic design of program analysis frameworks. In: Proceedings 6th ACM symposium on principles of programming languages (POPL’79). ACM Press, pp 269–282
Cousot P, Cousot R (1979) Constructive versions of Tarski’s fixed point theorems. Pac J Math 82(1):43–57
Cousot P, Cousot R (1992) Abstract interpretation frameworks. J Log Comput 2(4):511–547
Cousot P, Cousot R (1994) Higher-order abstract interpretation (and application to comportment analysis generalizing strictness, termination, projection and PER analysis of functional languages) (Invited Paper). In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer languages (ICCL’94). IEEE Computer Society Press, pp 95–112
Daskalakis C, Goldberg PW, Papadimitriou CH (2009) The complexity of computing a Nash equilibrium. SIAM J Comput 39(1):195–259
Daskalakis C, Mehta A, Papadimitriou CH (2007) Progress in approximate Nash equilibria. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM conference on electronic commerce (EC’07). ACM Press, pp 355–358
Echenique F (2007) Finding all equilibria in games of strategic complements. J Econ Theory 135(1):514–532
Geser A, Knoop J, Lüttgen G, Steffen B, Rüthing O (1994) Chaotic fixed point iterations. Technical Report MIP-9403, University of Passau, Germany
Giacobazzi R, Ranzato F, Scozzari F (2000) Making abstract interpretations complete. J ACM 47(2):361–416
Gintis H (2009) Game theory evolving—a problem-centered introduction to modeling strategic interaction, 2nd edn. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Hazan E, Krauthgamer R (2011) How hard is it to approximate the best Nash equilibrium? SIAM J Comput 40(1):79–91
Miné A (2004) Weakly relational numerical abstract domains. Ph.D. thesis, École Polytechnique, France
Nielson F, Nielson HR, Hankin C (1999) Principles of program analysis. Springer, Berlin
Plotkin G (1976) A powerdomain construction. SIAM J Comput 5(3):452–486
Ranzato F (2015) A new characterization of complete Heyting and co-Heyting algebras. Logical Methods in Computer Science, to appear, 2017
Ranzato F (2016) Abstract interpretation of supermodular games. In: Proceedings of the 23rd international static analysis symposium (SAS’16), LNCS, vol 9837. Springer, pp 403–423
Smyth M (1978) Power domains. J Comput Syst Sci 16(1):23–36
Straccia U, Ojeda-Aciego M, Damásio CV (2008) On fixed-points of multivalued functions on complete lattices and their application to generalized logic programs. SIAM J Comput 38(5):1881–1911
Topkis DM (1978) Minimizing a submodular function on a lattice. Oper Res 26(2):305–321
Topkis DM (1998) Supermodularity and complementarity. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Veinott AF (1989) Lattice programming. Unpublished notes from lectures at Johns Hopkins University
Wikipedia. Battle of the sexes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_sexes_(game_theory)
Zhou L (1994) The set of Nash equilibria of a supermodular game is a complete lattice. Games Econ Behav 7(2):295–300
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions. The author has been partially supported by the University of Padova under the PRAT project “ANCORE” no. CPDA148418.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ranzato, F. Abstracting Nash equilibria of supermodular games. Form Methods Syst Des 53, 259–285 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-017-0291-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-017-0291-x