Constrained existence problem for weak subgame perfect equilibria with ω-regular Boolean objectives

We study multiplayer turn-based games played on a finite directed graph such that each player aims at satisfying an ω-regular Boolean objective. Instead of the well-known notions of Nash equilibrium (NE) and subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE), we focus on the recent notion of weak subgame perfect equilibrium (weak SPE), a refinement of SPE. In this setting, players who deviate can only use the subclass of strategies that differ from the original one on a finite number of histories. We are interested in the constrained existence problem for weak SPEs. We provide a complete characterization of the computational complexity of this problem: it is P-complete for Explicit Muller objectives, NP-complete for Co-Büchi, Parity, Muller, Rabin, and Streett objectives, and PSPACE-complete for Reachability and Safety objectives (we only prove NP-membership for Büchi objectives). We also show that the constrained existence problem is fixed parameter tractable and is polynomial when the number of players is fixed. All these results are based on a fine-grained analysis of a fixpoint algorithm that computes the set of possible payoff profiles underlying weak SPEs.

Authors

• Thomas Brihaye
• Véronique Bruyère
• Aline Goeminne
• Jean-François Raskin

Keywords

• Multiplayer non zero-sum graph game
• Weak subgame perfect equilibrium
• Decidability of the constrained existence of an equilibrium
• Omega-regular objectives