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Factoring games to isolate strategic interactions

Published: 14 May 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Game theoretic reasoning about multi-agent systems has been made more tractable by algorithms that exploit various types of independence in agents' utilities. However, previous work has assumed that a game's precise independence structure is given in advance. This paper addresses the problem of finding independence structure in a general form game when it is not known ahead of time, or of finding an approximation when full independence does not exist. We give an expected polynomial time algorithm to divide a bounded-payout normal form game into factor games that isolate independent strategic interactions. We also show that the best approximate factoring can be found in polynomial time for a specific interaction that is not fully independent. Once known, factors aide computation of game theoretic solution concepts, including Nash equilibria (or ε-equilibria for approximate factors), in some cases guaranteeing polynomial complexity where previous bounds were exponential.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Factorization of Dynamic Games over Spatio-Temporal Resources2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981416(13159-13166)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
  • (2009)Generalization risk minimization in empirical game modelsProceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 110.5555/1558013.1558089(553-560)Online publication date: 10-May-2009

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AAMAS '07: Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
May 2007
1585 pages
ISBN:9788190426275
DOI:10.1145/1329125
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 14 May 2007

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Author Tags

  1. compact forms
  2. finding structure
  3. game theory

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  • (2022)Factorization of Dynamic Games over Spatio-Temporal Resources2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981416(13159-13166)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
  • (2009)Generalization risk minimization in empirical game modelsProceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 110.5555/1558013.1558089(553-560)Online publication date: 10-May-2009

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