Strong Nash Equilibria in Games with the Lexicographic Improvement Property

Speaker

Tobias Harks, TU Berlin
Title Strong Nash Equilibria in Games with the Lexicographic Improvement Property
When 23.07.2009
Where Lecture Room Informatik 7
Abstract We introduce a class of finite strategic games having the property that every deviation of a coalition of players that is profitable to all of its members strictly decreases the lexicographical order of a certain function defined on the strategy space. We call this property Lexicographical Improvement Property (LIP) and give a characterization of this property by proving that a generalized strong ordinal potential function must exist. We use our characterization to derive existence, efficiency and fairness properties of strong Nash equilibria.

We also discuss extensions to games with infinite strategy spaces. Finally, we derive a variety of games (related to congestion games) that actually possess the LIP.

This is joint work with Max Klimm and Rolf Moehring.