On games with coordinating and anti-coordinating agents

TL;DR

This paper investigates the existence and characterization of Nash equilibria in complex networks where agents are either coordinating or anti-coordinating, providing conditions and algorithms for their analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a checkable condition on threshold distributions that determines Nash equilibrium existence in mixed agent games, along with an explicit algorithm for their complete set.

Findings

A condition for Nash equilibrium existence in mixed agent games.

An explicit algorithm to determine all Nash equilibria when the condition is met.

Explicit computation of the number of equilibria in single-agent-type scenarios.

Abstract

This work studies Nash equilibria for games where a mixture of coordinating and anti-coordinating agents, with possibly heterogeneous thresholds, coexist and interact through an all-to-all network. Whilst games with only coordinating or only anti-coordinating agents are potential, also in the presence of heterogeneities, this does not hold when both type of agents are simultaneously present. This makes their analysis more difficult and existence of Nash equilibria not guaranteed. Our main result is a checkable condition on the threshold distributions that characterizes the existence of Nash equilibria in such mixed games. When this condition is satisfied an explicit algorithm allows to determine the complete set of such equilibria. Moreover, for the special case when only one type of agents is present (either coordinating or anti-coordinating), our results allow an explicit computation of the cardinality of Nash equilibria.