Existence of evolutionarily stable strategies remains hard to decide for a wide range of payoff values

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-57586-5_35MaRDI QIDQ5283386zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Themistoklis Melissourgos, P. G. Spirakis

Publication date 21 July 2017

Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08108

zbMATH Keywords

computational complexitygame theoryevolutionarily stable strategiesrobust reduction

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Computational difficulty of problems (lower bounds, completeness, difficulty of approximation, etc.) (68Q17) Evolutionary games (91A22)

Abstract: The concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), introduced by Smith and Price, is a refinement of Nash equilibrium in 2-player symmetric games in order to explain counter-intuitive natural phenomena, whose existence is not guaranteed in every game. The problem of deciding whether a game possesses an ESS has been shown to be $Sigm{a}_2^P$-complete by Conitzer using the preceding important work by Etessami and Lochbihler. The latter, among other results, proved that deciding the existence of ESS is both NP-hard and coNP-hard. In this paper we introduce a "reduction robustness" notion and we show that deciding the existence of an ESS remains coNP-hard for a wide range of games even if we arbitrarily perturb within some intervals the payoff values of the game under consideration. In contrast, ESS exist almost surely for large games with random and independent payoffs chosen from the same distribution.

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Cites work

• Evolutionarily stable strategies of random games, and the vertices of random polygons
• Existence of evolutionarily stable strategies remains hard to decide for a wide range of payoff values
• Maxima for Graphs and a New Proof of a Theorem of Turán
• Non-cooperative games
• The complexity of facets (and some facets of complexity)
• The computational complexity of evolutionarily stable strategies
• The logic of animal conflict

Cited in

(2)

• The computational complexity of evolutionarily stable strategies
• Existence of evolutionarily stable strategies remains hard to decide for a wide range of payoff values

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