VOCAL 2024
Abstract Submission

50. Value-Positivity for Matrix Games

Invited abstract in session TB-2: Strategic games, stream Game theory.

Thursday, 10:00 - 11:30
Room: C 103

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Raimundo Saona
Intitute of Science and Technology Austria

Abstract

Matrix games are the most basic problem in Game Theory, but robustness to small perturbations is not yet fully understood.
A perturbed matrix game is one where the entries depend on a parameter which varies smoothly around zero. We introduce two new concepts:
(a) value-positivity if, for every sufficiently small error, there is a strategy that guarantees the value of the error-free matrix game; and
(b) uniform value-positivity if there exists a fixed strategy that guarantees, for every sufficiently small error, the value of the error-free matrix game.
While the first concept captures the dependency of optimal strategies to small perturbations, the second naturally arises where the data is uncertain and a strategy should remain optimal despite that uncertainty.
In this paper, we provide explicit polynomial-time algorithms to solve these two problems for any polynomially perturbed matrix game.
For (a), we further provide a functional form for the error-dependent optimal strategy.
Last, we translate our results into robust solutions for LPs.

Keywords

Status: accepted


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