A hundred impossibility proofs for distributed computing
Proceedings of the eighth annual ACM Symposium on Principles of distributed computing
The space complexity of approximating the frequency moments
STOC '96 Proceedings of the twenty-eighth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Self-stabilization
Stable internet routing without global coordination
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
The stable paths problem and interdomain routing
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
The Communication Complexity of Approximate Set Packing and Covering
ICALP '02 Proceedings of the 29th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
Hundreds of impossibility results for distributed computing
Distributed Computing - Papers in celebration of the 20th anniversary of PODC
The complexity of game dynamics: BGP oscillations, sink equilibria, and beyond
Proceedings of the nineteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
STOC '08 Proceedings of the fortieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Asynchronous Best-Reply Dynamics
WINE '08 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
On the complexity of nash dynamics and sink equilibria
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Incentive compatibility and dynamics of congestion control
Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
On the structure of weakly acyclic games
SAGT'10 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Algorithmic game theory
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In many computational and economic models of multi-agent interaction, each participant repeatedly "best-responds" to the others' actions. Game theory research on the prominent "best-response dynamics" model typically relies on the premise that the interaction between agents is somehow synchronized. However, in many real-life settings, e.g., internet protocols and large-scale markets, the interaction between participants is asynchronous. We tackle the following important questions: (1) When are best-response dynamics guaranteed to converge to an equilibrium even under asynchrony? (2) What is the (computational and communication) complexity of verifying guaranteed convergence? We show that, in general, verifying guaranteed convergence is intractable. In fact, our main negative result establishes that this task is undecidable. We exhibit, in contrast, positive results for several environments of interest, including complete, computationally-tractable, characterizations of convergent systems. We discuss the algorithmic implications of our results, which extend beyond best-response dynamics to applications such as asynchronous Boolean circuits.