Complexity of Efficient Outcomes in Binary-Action Polymatrix Games and Implications for Coordination Problems

Complexity of Efficient Outcomes in Binary-Action Polymatrix Games and Implications for Coordination Problems

Argyrios Deligkas, Eduard Eiben, Gregory Gutin, Philip Neary, Anders Yeo

Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2642-2650. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2023/294

We investigate the difficulty of finding economically efficient solutions to coordination problems on graphs. Our work focuses on two forms of coordination problem: pure-coordination games and anti-coordination games. We consider three objectives in the context of simple binary-action polymatrix games: (i) maximizing welfare, (ii) maximizing potential, and (iii) finding a welfare-maximizing Nash equilibrium. We introduce an intermediate, new graph-partition problem, termed MWDP, which is of independent interest, and we provide a complexity dichotomy for it. This dichotomy, among other results, provides as a corollary a dichotomy for Objective (i) for general binary-action polymatrix games. In addition, it reveals that the complexity of achieving these objectives varies depending on the form of the coordination problem. Specifically, Objectives (i) and (ii) can be efficiently solved in pure-coordination games, but are NP-hard in anti-coordination games. Finally, we show that objective (iii) is NP-hard even for simple non-trivial pure-coordination games.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Noncooperative games
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Coordination and cooperation