Game Theory with Costly Computation

We develop a general game-theoretic framework for reasoning about strategic agents performing possibly costly computation. In this framework, many traditional game-theoretic results (such as the existence of a Nash equilibrium) no longer hold. Nevertheless, we can use the framework to provide psychologically appealing explanations to observed behavior in wellstudied games (such as finitely repeated prisoner's dilemma and rock-paper-scissors). Furthermore, we provide natural conditions on games sufficient to guarantee that equilibria exist. As an application of this framework, we consider a notion of game-theoretic implementation of mediators in computational games. We show that a special case of this notion is equivalent to a variant of the traditional cryptographic definition of protocol security; this result shows that, when taking computation into account, the two approaches used for dealing with "deviating" players in two different communities--Nash equilibrium in g...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Joseph Y. Halpern, Rafael Pass
• Keywords: CORR 2008, Education, Game-theoretic, General Game-theoretic Framework, Nash Equilibrium