skip to main content
10.1145/1132516.1132527acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesstocConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

The complexity of computing a Nash equilibrium

Published:21 May 2006Publication History

ABSTRACT

We resolve the question of the complexity of Nash equilibrium by showing that the problem of computing a Nash equilibrium in a game with 4 or more players is complete for the complexity class PPAD. Our proof uses ideas from the recently-established equivalence between polynomial time solvability of normal form games and graphical games, establishing that these kinds of games can simulate a PPAD-complete class of Brouwer functions.

References

  1. P. Beame, S. Cook, J. Edmonds, R. Impagliazzo, T. Pitassi. "The Relative Complexity of NP Search Problems," J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 57, 1, pp. 13--19, 1998. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. X. Chen and X. Deng. "3-NASH is PPAD-Complete," Electronic Colloquium in Computational Complexity TR05-134, 2005.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  3. X. Chen and X. Deng. "Settling the Complexity of 2-Player Nash-Equilibrium," Electronic Colloquium in Computational Complexity TR05-140, 2005.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  4. X. Chen, X. Deng and S. Teng. "Computing Nash Equilibria: Approximation and Smoothed Complexity," arXiv report, 2006.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  5. B. Codenotti, A. Saberi, K. Varadarajan and Y. Ye. "Leontief Economies Encode Nonzero Sum Two-Player Games," Proceedings of SODA, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. V. Conitzer and T. Sandholm. "Complexity Results about Nash Equilibria," Proceedings of IJCAI, 2003. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. C. Daskalakis, A. Fabrikant and C. H. Papadimitriou. "The Game World is Flat: The Complexity of Nash Equilibria in Succinct Games," To appear, 2006.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  8. C. Daskalakis and C. H. Papadimitriou. "Three-Player Games Are Hard," Electronic Colloquium in Computational Complexity TR05-139, 2005.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  9. A. Fabrikant, C.H. Papadimitriou and K. Talwar. "The Complexity of Pure Nash Equilibria," Proceedings of STOC, 2004. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. J. Geanakoplos. "Nash and Walras Equilibrium via Brouwer," Economic Theory, 21, 2003.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  11. I. Gilboa and E. Zemel. "Nash and correlated equilibria: Some complexity considerations," Games and Economic Behavior, 1989.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  12. P. W. Goldberg and C. H. Papadimitriou. "Reducibility Among Equilibrium Problems," Proceedings of STOC, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. M. Hirsch, C. H. Papadimitriou and S. Vavasis. "Exponential Lower Bounds for Finding Brouwer Fixpoints," J. Complexity 5, pp. 379--416, 1989. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. D. S. Johnson, C. H. Papadimitriou and M. Yannakakis, "How Easy is Local Search?," J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 37, 1, pp. 79--100,1988. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. M. Kearns, M. Littman and S. Singh. "Graphical Models for Game Theory," Proceedings of UAI, 2001. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  16. C. E. Lemke and J. T. Howson, Jr. "Equilibrium points of bimatrix games", SIAM J. Appl. Math. 12, pp. 413--423, 1964.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  17. R. Lipton and E. Markakis. "Nash Equilibria via Polynomial Equations," Proceedings of LATIN, 2004.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  18. R. Lipton, E. Markakis and A. Mehta. "Playing large games using simple strategies," Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 2003. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  19. M. Littman, M. Kearns and S. Singh. "An Efficient Exact Algorithm for Single Connected Graphical Games," Proceedings of NIPS, 2002.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  20. J. Nash. "Noncooperative Games," Annals of Mathematics, 54, 289--295, 1951.Google ScholarGoogle ScholarCross RefCross Ref
  21. J. von Neumann and O. Morgenstern. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Princeton University Press, 1944.Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  22. M.J. Osborne and A. Rubinstein. A Course in Game Theory, MIT Press (1994).Google ScholarGoogle Scholar
  23. C. H. Papadimitriou. "On the Complexity of the Parity Argument and Other Inefficient Proofs of Existence," J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 48, 3, pp. 498--532, 1994. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  24. C. H. Papadimitriou and T. Roughgarden. "Computing equilibria in multi-player games," Proceedings of SODA, 2005. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  25. C. H. Papadimitriou. "Computing Correlated Equilibria in Multiplayer Games," Proceedings of STOC, 2005. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  26. R. Savani and B. von Stengel. "Exponentially many steps for finding a Nash equilibrium in a Bimatrix Game," Proceedings of FOCS, 2004. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  27. G. Schoenebeck and S. Vadhan. "The Computational Complexity of Nash Equilibria in Concisely Represented Games," To appear in ACM EC, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. The complexity of computing a Nash equilibrium

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in
    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      STOC '06: Proceedings of the thirty-eighth annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing
      May 2006
      786 pages
      ISBN:1595931341
      DOI:10.1145/1132516

      Copyright © 2006 ACM

      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]

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 21 May 2006

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • Article

      Acceptance Rates

      Overall Acceptance Rate1,469of4,586submissions,32%

      Upcoming Conference

      STOC '24
      56th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC 2024)
      June 24 - 28, 2024
      Vancouver , BC , Canada

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader