Game Theory with Costly Computation: Formulation and Application to Protocol Security

: 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 well-studied 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 develop a definition of protocol security relying on game-theoretic notions of implementation. We show that a natural special case of this this definition 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 communit...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICS
• Authors: Joseph Y. Halpern, Rafael Pass
• Keywords: ICS 2010, Theoritical Computer Science