Existence of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies Remains Hard to Decide for a Wide Range of Payoff Values



Melissourgos, Themistoklis ORCID: 0000-0002-9867-6257 and Spirakis, Paul ORCID: 0000-0001-5396-3749
(2017) Existence of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies Remains Hard to Decide for a Wide Range of Payoff Values. In: 10th International Conference on Algorithms and Complexity - CIAC 2017, 2017-5-24 - 2017-5-26, Athens Greece.

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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 $\Sigma_{2}^{P}$-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.

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Unspecified)
Additional Information: 24 pages, 4 figures
Uncontrolled Keywords: Game theory, Computational complexity, Evolutionarily stable strategies, Robust reduction
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 06 Feb 2017 10:24
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 07:19
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-57586-5_35
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3005550