symposium articles: A differentiable homotopy to compute Nash equilibria of n -person games

B-Tier
Journal: Economic Theory
Year: 2001
Volume: 18
Issue: 1
Pages: 159-185

Score contribution per author:

1.005 = (α=2.01 / 2 authors) × 1.0x B-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

The literature on the computation of Nash equilibria in n-person games is dominated by simplicial methods. This paper is the first to introduce a globally convergent algorithm that fully exploits the differentiability present in the problem. It presents an everywhere differentiable homotopy to do the computations. The homotopy path can therefore be followed by several numerical techniques. Moreover, instead of computing some Nash equilibrium, the algorithm is constructed in such a way that it computes the Nash equilibrium selected by the tracing procedure of Harsanyi and Selten. As a by-product of our proofs it follows that for a generic game the tracing procedure defines a unique feasible path. The numerical performance of the algorithm is illustrated by means of several examples.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:spr:joecth:v:18:y:2001:i:1:p:159-185
Journal Field
Theory
Author Count
2
Added to Database
2026-01-25