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

Authors:
Paul W. Goldberg;Christos H. Papadimitriou;Rahul Savani
Affiliations:
University of Liverpool;University of California at Berkeley;University of Liverpool
Venue:
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation - Special Issue on Algorithmic Game Theory
Year:
2013

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Abstract

We show that the widely used homotopy method for solving fixpoint 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-Howson algorithm, a complexity-theoretic strengthening of the result in Savani and von Stengel [2006]. These results show that our techniques can be widely applied and suggest that the PSPACE-completeness of implementing homotopy methods is a general principle.