Extending the notion of rationality of selfish agents: Second Order Nash equilibria

  • Authors:
  • Vittorio Bilò;Michele Flammini

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Matematica Ennio De Giorgi, Università del Salento, Provinciale Lecce-Arnesano, P.O. Box 193, 73100 Lecce, Italy;Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di LAquila, Via Vetoio, Loc. Coppito, 67100 LAquila, Italy

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 5.23

Visualization

Abstract

Motivated by the increasing interest of the Computer Science community in the study and understanding of non-cooperative systems, we present a novel model for formalizing the rational behavior of agents with a more farsighted view of the consequences of their actions. This approach yields a framework creating new equilibria, which we call Second Order equilibria, starting from a ground set of traditional ones. By applying our approach to pure Nash equilibria, we define the set of Second Order pure Nash equilibria and present their applications to the Prisoner's Dilemma game, to an instance of Braess's Paradox in the Wardrop model and to the KP model with identical machines.