Paper Info
Title
Existence of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies Remains Hard to Decide for a Wide Range of Payoff Values.
Abstract
The concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), introduced by Smith and Price [4], 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(P)(2)-complete by Conitzer [1] using the preceding important work by Etessami and Lochbihler [2]. 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 [11].
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/978-3-319-57586-5_35
ALGORITHMS AND COMPLEXITY (CIAC 2017)
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Game theory,Computational complexity,Evolutionarily stable strategies,Robust reduction
Conference
10236
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
0
0.34
References 
Authors
3
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Themistoklis Melissourgos112.04
Paul G. Spirakis22222299.05