The Complexity of the Homotopy Method, Equilibrium Selection, and Lemke-Howson Solutions

  • Authors:
  • Paul W. Goldberg;Christos H. Papadimitriou;Rahul Savani

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • FOCS '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 52nd Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We show that the widely used homotopy method for solving fix point problems, as well as the Harsanyi-Selten equilibrium selection process for games, are PSPACE-complete to implement. Extending our result for the Harsanyi-Selten process, we show that several other homotopy-based algorithms for finding equilibria of games are also PSPACE-complete to implement. A further application of our techniques yields the result that it is PSPACE-complete to compute any of the equilibria that could be found via the classical Lemke-How son algorithm, a complexity-theoretic strengthening of the result in [24]. These results show that our techniques can be widely applied and suggest that the PSPACE-completeness of implementing homotopy methods is a general principle.