Paul, Soumya and Ramanujam, R. and Simon, Sunil :: Stability under Strategy Switching

authors

Paul, Soumya and Ramanujam, R. and Simon, Sunil

url

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-03073-4_40

Partial strategies, strategy composition, a switch operator to compose strategies with, and a notion of stability that says switch-free strategies are stable.

Abstract. We suggest that a process-like notion of strategy is relevant in the context of interactions in systems of self-interested agents. In this view, strategies are not plans formulated by rational agents consider- ing all possible futures and (mutually recursively) taking into account strategies employed by other players. Instead, they are partial; players start with a set of potential strategies and dynamically switch between them. This necessitates some means in the model for players to access each others’ strategies, and we suggest a syntax by which players’ ra- tionale for such switching may be specified and structurally composed. In such a model one can ask a stability question: given a game arena and a strategy specification, whether players eventually settle down to strategies without further switching. We show that this problem can be algorithmically solved using automata theoretic methods.