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Beyond nash equilibrium: solution concepts for the 21st century

Published: 18 August 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Nash equilibrium is the most commonly-used notion of equilibrium in game theory. However, it suffers from numerous problems. Some are well known in the game theory community; for example, the Nash equilibrium of repeated prisoner's dilemma is neither normatively nor descriptively reasonable. However, new problems arise when considering Nash equilibrium from a computer science perspective: for example, Nash equilibrium is not robust (it does not tolerate "faulty" or "unexpected" behavior), it does not deal with coalitions, it does not take computation cost into account, and it does not deal with cases where players are not aware of all aspects of the game. Solution concepts that try to address these shortcomings of Nash equilibrium are discussed.

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cover image ACM Conferences
PODC '08: Proceedings of the twenty-seventh ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
August 2008
474 pages
ISBN:9781595939890
DOI:10.1145/1400751
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Publication History

Published: 18 August 2008

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Author Tags

  1. awareness
  2. game theory
  3. nash equilibrium
  4. resilience
  5. robustness
  6. solution concepts

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