Query complexity of approximate equilibria in anonymous games

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Publication:2403236



Abstract: We study the computation of equilibria of anonymous games, via algorithms that may proceed via a sequence of adaptive queries to the game's payoff function, assumed to be unknown initially. The general topic we consider is emph{query complexity}, that is, how many queries are necessary or sufficient to compute an exact or approximate Nash equilibrium. We show that exact equilibria cannot be found via query-efficient algorithms. We also give an example of a 2-strategy, 3-player anonymous game that does not have any exact Nash equilibrium in rational numbers. However, more positive query-complexity bounds are attainable if either further symmetries of the utility functions are assumed or we focus on approximate equilibria. We investigate four sub-classes of anonymous games previously considered by cite{bfh09, dp14}. Our main result is a new randomized query-efficient algorithm that finds a O(n−1/4)-approximate Nash equilibrium querying ildeO(n3/2) payoffs and runs in time ildeO(n3/2). This improves on the running time of pre-existing algorithms for approximate equilibria of anonymous games, and is the first one to obtain an inverse polynomial approximation in poly-time. We also show how this can be utilized as an efficient polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS). Furthermore, we prove that Omega(nlogn) payoffs must be queried in order to find any epsilon-well-supported Nash equilibrium, even by randomized algorithms.












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