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

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-57586-5_35zbMATH Open1487.91012arXiv1701.08108OpenAlexW2584180193MaRDI QIDQ5283386FDOQ5283386

Themistoklis Melissourgos, P. G. Spirakis

Publication date: 21 July 2017

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

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.

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

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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)

Cites Work

• Non-cooperative games
• The Logic of Animal Conflict
• Maxima for Graphs and a New Proof of a Theorem of Turán
• The complexity of facets (and some facets of complexity)
• Evolutionarily stable strategies of random games, and the vertices of random polygons
• The computational complexity of evolutionarily stable strategies
• The Exact Computational Complexity of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies
• Existence of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies Remains Hard to Decide for a Wide Range of Payoff Values

Cited In (2)

• Existence of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies Remains Hard to Decide for a Wide Range of Payoff Values
• The computational complexity of evolutionarily stable strategies

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