Beyond Symmetry in Repeated Games with Restarts
Henry Fleischmann, Kiriaki Fragkia, Ratip Emin Berker

TL;DR
This paper extends the concept of repeated games with restarts to asymmetric settings, characterizing equilibrium strategies, analyzing their incentives, and addressing the computational complexity of finding optimal strategies.
Contribution
It introduces and analyzes more general equilibria in asymmetric repeated games with restarts, beyond the symmetric case studied previously.
Findings
Characterization of incentivized goal strategies in equilibrium.
NP-hardness of finding minimal-cost action sequences.
Pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for social welfare maximization.
Abstract
Infinitely repeated games support equilibrium concepts beyond those present in one-shot games (e.g., cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma). Nonetheless, repeated games fail to capture our real-world intuition for settings with many anonymous agents interacting in pairs. Repeated games with restarts, introduced by Berker and Conitzer [IJCAI '24], address this concern by giving players the option to restart the game with someone new whenever their partner deviates from an agreed-upon sequence of actions. In their work, they studied symmetric games with symmetric strategies. We significantly extend these results, introducing and analyzing more general notions of equilibria in asymmetric games with restarts. We characterize which goal strategies players can be incentivized to play in equilibrium, and we consider the computational problem of finding such sequences of actions with minimal…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGame Theory and Applications · Game Theory and Voting Systems · Auction Theory and Applications
