Dominance Solvability in Random Games

Noga Alon; Kirill Rudov; Leeat Yariv

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arXiv · 2105.10743

Dominance Solvability in Random Games

Noga Alon·Kirill Rudov·Leeat Yariv

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Abstract

We study the effectiveness of iterated elimination of strictly-dominated actions in random games. We show that dominance solvability of games is vanishingly small as the number of at least one player's actions grows. Furthermore, conditional on dominance solvability, the number of iterations required to converge to Nash equilibrium grows rapidly as action sets grow. Nonetheless, when games are highly imbalanced, iterated elimination simplifies the game substantially by ruling out a sizable fraction of actions. Technically, we illustrate the usefulness of recent combinatorial methods for the analysis of general games.

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Noga Alon, Kirill Rudov, Leeat Yariv. 2021-05-22. Dominance Solvability in Random Games. https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10743

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