Study of potential games using Ising interaction

Problems can be handled properly in game theory as long as a countable number of players are considered, whereas, in real life, we have a large number of players. Hence, games at the thermodynamic limit are analyzed in general. There is a one-to-one correspondence between classical games and the modeled Hamiltonian at a particular equilibrium condition, usually the Nash equilibrium. Such a correspondence is arrived for symmetric games, namely the Prisoner’s Dilemma using the Ising Hamiltonian. In this work, we have shown that another class of games known as potential games can be analyzed with the Ising Hamiltonian. Analysis of this work brings out very close observation with real-world scenarios. In other words, the model of a potential game studied using Ising Hamiltonian predicts behavioral aspects of a large population precisely.

Multi-leader-follower potential games

In this paper, we discuss a particular class of Nash games, where the participants of the game (the players) are divided into two groups (leaders and followers) according to their position or influence on the other players. Moreover, we consider the case, when the leaders’ and/or the followers’ game can be described as a potential game. This is a subclass of Nash games that has been introduced by Monderer and Shapley in 1996 and has beneficial properties to reformulate the bilevel Nash game. We develope necessary and sufficient conditions for Nash equilibria and present existence and uniqueness results. Furthermore, we discuss some Examples to illustrate our results. In this paper, we discussed analytical properties for multi-leader follower potential games, that form a subclass of hierarchical Nash games. The application of these theoretical results to various fields of applications are a future research topic. Moreover, they are meant to serve as a starting point for the developement of efficient numerical solution methods for multi-leader-follower games.