Abstract
We study the number of pure strategy Nash equilibria in a “random” n-person non-cooperative game in which all players have a countable number of strategies. We consider both the cases where all players have strictly and weakly ordinal preferences over their outcomes. For both cases, we show that the distribution of the number of pure strategy Nash equilibria approaches the Poisson distribution with mean 1 as the numbers of strategies of two or more players go to infinity. We also find, for each case, the distribution of the number of pure strategy Nash equilibria when the number of strategies of one player goes to infinity, while those of the other players remain finite.
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Powers IY (1986) The Distribution of the Number of Pure Strategy Nash Equilibria in n-Person Games, Part 1 of Three Essays in Game Theory, Ph. D. Dissertation, Yale University
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This paper is a revised version of the first part of the author's Ph. D. dissertation at Yale University. The author thanks Martin Shubik for suggesting the problem, and Michael R. Powers for his technical assistance.
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Powers, I.Y. Limiting distributions of the number of pure strategy Nash equilibria in n-person games. Int J Game Theory 19, 277–286 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01755478
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01755478