Potentials and their uses in strategic games

Speaker(s)

Krzysztof R. Apt

Affiliation

Uniwersytet Warszawski

Date

Nov. 5, 2014, 2:15 p.m.

Room

room 4050

Seminar

Seminar of Biomathematics and Game Theory Group

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The idea of a potential was introduced in the influential paper of
Monderer and Shapley in 1994. It is a technique that allows one to conclude that a strategic game has a Nash equilibrium.  We shall discuss the main aspects of this paper and subsequently illustrate other uses of potentials in our recent work on coordination games on graphs.
In each such game the players are the nodes of a graph. Each node selects a colour from a set of colours (privately) available for it. The payoff to a node is the number of neighbours who chose the same colour.  These games capture the idea of coordination in a local setting strategies. We shall focus on the issue of existence of Nash equilibria, k-equilibria and strong equilibria.
This is a joint work with Mona Rahn, Guido Schaefer and Sunil Simon.

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