Abstract
In view of the intractability of finding a Nash equilibrium, it is important to understand the limits of approximation in this context. A subexponential approximation scheme is known [LMM03], and no approximation better than \(1\over 4\) is possible by any algorithm that examines equilibria involving fewer than logn strategies [Alt94]. We give a simple, linear-time algorithm examining just two strategies per player and resulting in a \(1\over 2\)-approximate Nash equilibrium in any 2-player game. For the more demanding notion of well-supported approximate equilibrium due to [DGP06] no nontrivial bound is known; we show that the problem can be reduced to the case of win-lose games (games with all utilities 0–1), and that an approximation of \(5\over 6\) is possible contingent upon a graph-theoretic conjecture.
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Daskalakis, C., Mehta, A., Papadimitriou, C. (2006). A Note on Approximate Nash Equilibria. In: Spirakis, P., Mavronicolas, M., Kontogiannis, S. (eds) Internet and Network Economics. WINE 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4286. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11944874_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11944874_27
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68138-0
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